Experience does make a difference...

After last class and tonight’s discussion, I agree that Dewey does make many good points and his suggestions could definitely be helpful to us as teachers. His point “we can be aware of consequences only because of previous experiences” (pg. 68) especially stood out to me. Everything that we have done in our pasts somehow affects our futures. For me personally, (relating this back to the vocational discussion a little) in high school, choosing to take part in the broadcasting program led me to want to go further with it, and I majored in it in college and obtained a degree in the field. After finding out that the market is very, very competitive especially since the market often moves “newbie’s” to small Podunk towns, extremely hard for fresh out of college kids to get into and not a very friendly, family oriented career, I decided that it wasn’t for me. (guess at 17 you don’t always think these things out in the long run huh?) These two experiences with broadcasting helped me figure out that it wasn’t for me. However, my experience with going to high school and college was good so I decided to go back to school to become a teacher and having previously worked so much with writing and reading, English Education became my major. So, my point here is that all of my experiences have nonetheless lead me to what I am currently doing and have had an affect on me on the way, just as Dewey has stressed. I know what can come of my going back to school, the consequences, I will be able to obtain another degree. This can also point to his ends and means comment, that every means leads to more means and more ends, as well as his memory of the past, observation of the present, and purpose for the future reference.
As for his thoughts on how schools and teachers need to be aware of their students’ past experiences and provide them with useful experiences for the future, I somewhat question. I don’t question the idea because I think that it would indeed be wonderful, but I question how it can possibly be done for so many different students in today’s society. I think it is almost impossible due to the popular answer given in class; there are so many social surroundings. I like the statement Dewey makes about school should be a place that it is ok to fail, not fail in a negative sense, but discover that it is ok not to get everything correct every time. Students should be able to learn from their mistakes and school should be a safe haven that allows for this. Learning should be a continuous process and reconstructing of experiences, but I must admit, I am scared of not being able to do this for all students. Is it really a possible solution or is it something that can only fully take place in a perfect world?

Morality?

For a few moments this evening, I sat in class pondering, "What are we actually debating about here?" On the literal side, I grasp all of the concepts that were brought up. I guess what we discussed is just the progression of morality issues through time, but what bothers me about the discussion is I am not sure if people understand what they are getting themselves into when they are to become teachers in the schools of today's society. As for myself, I am a white female. The morality issue of whether or not I was going to hit someone or strike back was never in issue. Even in New Orleans. I guess no one (thankfully)has ever wanted to hit me. I come from a middle class family of all girls. My point here is that I knew even without the speech that hitting is/was wrong. I assist in teaching photography classes to high school ESL kids. One of the assignments was for the kids to write a narrative about a personal memory. The stories I heard yesterday were ones I will never forget, and at the same time one in particular had to do with a young man's morality. This student is now 17 and a senior, but when he was younger, in his native town, he was in a gang. The student morally knew and knows that gangs were/are bad, but in a Darwin-survival-of-the-fittest way, had no choice but to be in a gang. The particular story he told was a circumstance in which, in a gang related incident, he was put in jail at the age of 14 for a crime, murder none the less, that he didn't commit. At 15 he was let out for good behavior, but after he was out, his gang tried to get him back. Once you are in, you are in for life, or get killed. So he escaped to America. What he went through before the murder, what he went through in the jail, and what he has gone through since then are all issues hopefully none of us will ever face. He is very candid about this story, with many more details that I do not feel it is my MORAL obligation to tell.

Point here: kids/students, I feel, do know the basic rights and wrongs in our society. But I really feel that worrying about one student hitting another-though not to be trivialized-is not as significant as other issues that may be going on in these kids pasts and presents. As teachers, we would be remiss if we neglected these facts.

I guess my main thought in all this digression is that as teachers we will be faced with many issues that Dewey's classrooms and peers would have never had. Does this make anyone's opinion or baggage more or less right or wrong? That's up to the individual to decide. Maybe I did miss the point of the class discussion on morality. I didn't touch base on the morality of robbing a bank; that is worse than hitting I guess. I can only hope that with all of the craziness going on in society today that worrying about one student hitting another is the worst situation I will be faced with in my own classroom.

A little humor for April Fools Day

http://www.offthemark.com/search-results/key/education/

A collection of educational cartoons that will hopefully brighten your day. The first one reminds me of some of our discussions on Bloom's view of American education.

Developing a Theory of Education

In his book Experience & Education, Dewey constantly stresses that each society should form a Theory of Education to establish the common grounding principles of education and to help avoid knee-jerk reactions to the newest research or learning theories. It seems that in America we are moving toward the goal of establishing a theory of education that is closely tied to the Constructivist theory of learning, where students are lead in a manner so as to 'construct' their own knowledge in a subject. This learning theory seems to go hand in hand with Dewey's statement that class material should be presented as a progressive organization of knowledge, building on what students already know and helping students make connections to other areas of learning. Is having a shared theory like this enough, or should each of us subscribe to a theory of education?

A major factor that Dewey calls for that seems to be missing, or perhaps is not yet expressed in the Constructivist theory, is that school should be a social experience. It seems to be a giant demand that Dewey makes on teachers to encourage students' individuality and non-conformity while maintaining order and an effective, positive learning environment in the class. How as future teachers can we do this, while being subject ourselves to the limiting rules of school and while having to enforce similar rules on the students? How can we as future teachers make school sufficiently social, and yet still maintain the value of individual work? Can leading purposeful classroom discourse alone meet this demand? I am left with many questions about how to implement a John Dewey approved learning environment and experiences for my future students.

Thoughts on Last class

The whole concept of learning the rules so we can all play the game is an interesting one to me, why do some people obviously decide to not play the game?  I know that I personally learned the rules of general society and decided that in my eyes, the game seemed to be 'rigged'  and since there was no way to fix that in my eyes I decided to stop playing the game, I know that there are some rules in society that I still follow but now that I gave up the 'game' I have enjoyed life more, that is controversial I know, but the socialization that I personally experienced at school was vicious and elitist, based entirely on social class/wealth, there were such distinct divisions between groups.  I had the eye opening perspective of the fringe and after realizing that I was making myself miserable trying to fit in to a set standard.  When I gave that up and just focused on making myself happy, I was better off.  The giving up required me to throw off some of the learned 'habits', things that were 'expected' or 'acceptable'.  When I finally did this, I was emotionally better but for the most part socially ostracized, many other people have more friends, but few have the type of close friendships that I have with my small group.   The ideas of 'habits' things that we do as routine, these are necessary to function but too many things in our life become habit, in my personal experiences (again) artists are expected to 'problem solve' or be 'creative' constantly, if we rely too much on certain 'habits' we are not creative and do not make any advances.  People need to think about what is 'habit' for them and consider if these 'habits' are the best way to do these things or are they simply the way that they have been doing them, all things should be rethought on occasion, habits can trap a person into a stagnant cycle.
I thought that the information on growth was interesting, how one goes about shaping their life by the choices that they make, it made me think about the poem by Robert Frost - The Road Less Taken, I'm sure that everyone has read that poem so I don't need to quote it but it alludes to the idea that all the decisions that you make affect the decisions that you make in the future.  I agree that this is true, your past experiences do affect the future choices that you make.  Teachers must make sure that their classrooms promote beneficial experiences for their students so that they have a positive effect on the students future choices.  I think that making sure that children utilize their problem solving as much as possible will be helpful to this, there should be very few things that become 'habit' in a classroom, they do not learn from such things, you learn and grow when you have to think, not when you operate on autopilot.

Corridor of Shame

This article that I ran across was disturbing to me, I know that most of us in class are planning on teaching here in South Carolina and hearing that there are approximately 40 school districts in terrible states of disrepair frightens me a little.  The fact that the judge in the case found the schools to be acceptable makes me think that he should be forced to work/live in those conditions for a few weeks to see if his opinion doesn't change.  I know that I went to an older school that had some issues and repair needs but overall it was a wonderful experience, a historical school that I took pride in.  These children are suffering from terrible neglect by our state, their self-esteem probably suffers due to the dilapidated state of their schools.  These conditions have to be remedied if our state ever wants to pull itself out of the lower rungs of the educational ladder.

http://content.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=7535

Functionalism and Interpretivism

Last week, when reading Dewey I thought that there seemed to be an anti-functionalist theme in his writing. Now that I have had a chance to look back over my notes, I believe I was mistaken and must have been thinking about the metaphor of the factory, where students practice boring, repetitive tasks in school to prepare for boring, repetitive tasks in the workforce. After reviewing, I see many common threads between Dewey’s view and that of the functionalist, as well as that of the interpretivist. Like interpretivism, Dewey uses the metaphor of a game, stating that “the games involve rules, and these rules order their [the children’s] conduct” (p. 52). He also admonishes that the rules must be fair. The functionalist would agree that the rules must be fair; you should advance in the game based on achieved, not ascribed, characteristics. In this way, Dewey brings functionalism and interpretivism together. He seems to add his own touch to this combination as well. It seems that not only are we playing a game according to rules which must be fair, but that it is the job of the teacher to establish these fair rules in such a way as to encourage students to govern themselves and each other. In this manner, the teacher can lead the class without dictating to the class (thereby bringing traditionalist and progressive views together as well). I agree with many of John Dewey’s ideas and somehow he seems to make a place for most views in his writing. However, it seems that this is another prescription for what society should be like. Are Dewey’s goals, like those of functionalism, only geared toward the middle class? Also, what would Dewey say about the functionalist view that one of the purposes of schools is to sort students based on skill and ability?