I Won 't Learn From You

At first, Eubank did not believe her son when he complained about his mean teacher. The staff at the school suggested at her son should take medication because he was not concentrating on class. She took him to get an evaluation at Baylor University, but he was fine. After visiting the school, her eyes were opened by a student who was classmates with her son. Jessica Kelmon, an author for greatschools.org, writes that “the teacher would regularly humiliate him in front of the other students, yelling at him and slamming her hand on his desk (Kelmon).” This fourth-grade teacher is an example as to how much a teacher’s attitude toward the students affects their excitement to learn. When a student is being treated poorly by a teacher, an interesting subject can be ruined for that student.

Mike Rose is anything but average: he has published poetry, scholarly research, a textbook, and two widely praised books on education in Amer­ica. A professor in the School of Education at UCLA, Rose has won awards from the National Academy of Education, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Below you'll read the story of how this highly successful teacher and writer started high school in the "vocational education" track, learning dead-end skills from teachers who were often underprepared or incompetent. Rose shows that students whom the system has written off can have tremendous unreal­ized potential, and his critique of the school system

It has become common today to dismiss the lack of education coming from our impoverished public schools. Jonathan Kozol an award winning social injustice writer, trying to bring to light how our school system talks to their students. In his essay “Still Separate, Still Unequal," Kozol visits many public high schools as well as public elementary schools across the country, realizing the outrageous truth about segregating in our public education system. Kozol, cross-examining children describing their feelings as being put away where no one desires your presence. Children feeling diminished for being a minority; attending a school that does not take into consideration at the least the child’s well being. Showing clear signs of segregation in the education system.

In the mid 1800s, the question of whether slavery was ethical or not was a particularly contentious matter. Slaves struggled to withstand the harsh treatments from their master’s, along with getting an education, until 1865 when the Thirteenth Amendment formally abolished slavery. Although slavery was no longer tolerated, the racial bigotry did not end. Fast forward to the 1950s, and racial inequality is still prevalent in society. Segregation existed in almost every aspect of life ranging from miniscule topics such as where one can sit on the bus, to more serious topics such as quality of education one child receives. This discrimination was fought through protests in the civil rights movement throughout the 1950s and 1960s. As an American high school student in a country still plagued with racial discrimination today, it is imperative to remember the true value of a quality education. While James Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers” and Frederick Douglass’s “Learning to Read and Write” both emphasize the need for racial equality in education, Baldwin’s forceful and angry tone ultimately make his speech the more rhetorically effective of the two.

One in five American students has a learning disability this is according to the documentary “Misunderstood Minds’’ produced by WGBH. Children with learning disabilities are more likely to become outcasts in school and in society. The documentary follows five families dealing with a differently abled child; Nathan V, Lauren, Sarah Lee, Adam, and Nathan S. The film focuses on difficulties the families go through, professionalism or lack of it by school officials and demystification.

In the article, “How to Speak Asperger’s,” by Fran Goldfarb and Guthrie Devine, the authors contend that learning to communicate with people with Asperger’s Syndrome is an important skill. The authors introduce the article by providing a narrative about Goldfarb’s son. The point of her narrative is that communication is misunderstood with people with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS). The author, Fran Goldfarb, explains how her son misunderstands communication with his teachers, and how punishment is ineffective, because of his Asperger’s. The authors start by explaining why communication is very complex. To begin with, people with AS struggle with communication, because of their lack of social cues. They tend to miss irony, humor, and they take everything literally. That’s why people with AS don’t understand communication and everything is a struggle for them.

I am aware that there are better and worse high schools out there than Fremont High School. And yet, reading Kozol's account of the terrible conditions that are endured by these students made me feel more aware of the severity of improper or inadequate education that poorly funded schools provide. All of these problems, alongside my awareness of my fortunate years of education, make me wonder, just as Mireya did, as to why, "...[students] who need it so much more get so much less?" (Kozol 648). Interestingly, I have little to comment on Kozol's actual writing style, even though he wrote this account of his. I was just so attached to the characters within that school that I wanted to be able to reach out somehow; Kozol definitely achieved something very touching here.

Who we are and how we are treated as children is directly correlated to who we will become as adults. Spoken by Lyndon B. Johnson, “Until Justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.” These words are echoed throughout the educational system that is put in place today. Jonathan Kozol, an award-winning writer and public lecturer who focuses on social injustice in the United States, reverberates these words in his article, “From Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid”. Kozol proves his mastery in persuasion by the facts he provides and the personal anecdotes from teachers and students.

This documentary film encourages students, families and teachers to look beyond labels and discover the gifts each child possesses. Kent observes the behavior four kids with learning disabilities to see what their everyday lives are like. While these kids struggle with things like the ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell or do mathematical calculations, Kent illuminates their many talents that outshine their weaknesses.

Until quite recently, education in the United States has been more of a privilege than a human right. Slaves were deprived of reading and writing, and schools were not integrated until the Civil Rights Movement in the twentieth century. Even then, African-American students continued to face the harsh realities of discrimination and inferior opportunities to white students. Still today, while education has become mandatory for all children through law, many students are not provided with the proper information and resources to become successful adults. We often take education for granted, but for many young students, the idea of lifelong knowledge is somewhat of a liberating factor. Through often difficult yet inevitable situations, however,

What makes an individual special from anyone else? Is it their physical attributes, their upbringing, perhaps the effect of their environment? All of these things are the just the beginning layers of what encompasses a person’s identity. Identity is the knowledge of who we are and what groups we belong to, and unfortunately, it is not easily determined from person to person. It is a complex, developmental process that begins at birth and continues throughout an individual’s life (Sheets). One’s identity makes every individual unique, and this uniqueness facilitates growth by exchanging philosophies, ideas, and knowledge. Consequently, the most essential environment for these exchanges to occur is within a classroom. In Gregory Michie’s novel, Holler If You Hear Me, he accounts his time spent teaching inner city middle schools in Chicago. During his time in the Chicago Public School System, conflict of identity between teacher and student is present, which ultimately leads him to assess his teaching methods and reevaluate the processes he uses to connect with his students. Because the identities of his students differ from his own, Michie implements cultural relevant and sustaining pedagogy in his classroom in order to combat the students’ apathy, boredom, and lack of interest in school. There is importance in the way in which student and teacher identities intersect, and throughout Michie’s novel he demonstrates that by bringing in material that relates to the students’

Throughout this year, we have read two books, 50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools and Schooled: Ordinary, Extraordinary Teaching in an Age of Change, as well as several different articles spanning various topics regarding school and its purpose in society. We learned that each of us in class have had unique school experiences, whether we went to a public, private, charter, or home school. Each of our unique experiences have allowed us to share our personal encounters with school, both positive and negative. Through these readings we learned about how each of us has a stake in schools. We depend on one another to be educated enough to make important decisions, for example critically analyzing candidates and their platforms when deciding to vote. If I could suggest any three of our readings to a high school teacher, a parent, and to a fellow student, they would be the Postman and Weingartner section from Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Why Wrong is not Always Bad by Alina Tugend, and College is not a commodity. Stop treating it like one. by Rawlings, respectively. These articles stood out to me as the most informative as well as the most relative to many of the issues we see today.

Seph Koutsioukis is a 14 year old boy with autism. When he was in second grade he had so much trouble coping up and dealing with pressure of school. He was in a classroom at an elementary school in Simpsonville (Shah, 2011). For Seph, on-the-spot questions from teachers were a source of embarrassment. It was hard to concentrate and was easily distracted by sights and sounds in the colorful, occasionally loud room (Shah, 2011). Due to his problems his mother Kelly koutsioukis pulled him out of regular school and enrolled him in a virtual school (Hester, 2011). Seph who was 10-year-old then, had taken online classes through the South Carolina Connections Academy, a virtual school based in Columbia, (Shah, 2011).

Hunger Games brought me the joy of reading, and it became a hobby. It also helped me get along with other better. Before the Hunger Games, reading was more of stabbing me in the back. I tried to read, and I would leave clueless that I receive a bombing grade. I left feeling hopeless. I would end up barely pass the class and the milestone. When I struggle with reading, I’m sometimes stuck in my house upstairs in my room where it’s usually quiet as a mouse. So if I was busy with homework, I could not go to my Boy Scout meeting or play baseball. I lived in a county in Georgia that has a well-educated school system, and it is rough when I try to overcome my autism because my speech, reading and writing issues. Reading slows me down when I need to finish a project, get ready for a test, or sent in a reading blog. Plus, my mom will command me to read to her when I struggle with my reading decoding. Soon, it all started to change in eighth grade that happen by my mom’s three little words, the book, and the blog.

After analytically reviewing this week’s lectures and reading assignments, I have found myself re-visiting my teaching practices and perceptions of what we as educators could improve. The metaphorical beliefs that we have discussed and viewed as rational in the traditional sense of what school should or should not be.