By: WBEZ
For my blog this week I decided to do an extended
comment on Kamryn’s blog. After I listened to the radio thing and read the
article I went and read everyone’s blog. Kamryn basically said the exact things
that I was thinking.
I agree with Kamryn’s first point about how the radio
station was very SCWAAMP. The quote that Kamryn used,
"... that black and Latino kids in segregated schools
have the least qualified teachers, the least experienced teachers. They
also get the worst course offerings, the least access to AP and upper level
courses, the worst facilities. The other thing about most segregated
black schools, Nikole says, is that they have high concentrations of children
who grew up in poverty. Those kids have greater educational needs.
They're more stressed out. They have a bunch of disadvantages.
And when you put a lot of kids like that together in one classroom, studies
show, it doesn't go well."
was the exact quote that really got me. I think that
this is very evident even in schools that aren’t segregated. Just living in a “bad”
area and going to school this is seen. For example, in high school I had many
different classes that I was able to choose from for electives. Also there were
3 different levels of core classes that you could take based on how advanced
you were. I thought that it was something that all schools had but after
listening to this, I see how much of a privilege that it was to have those.
Also, when you put these children that all have a bad attitude regarding school
together, it is not going to be a very productive classroom.
I also agree with Kamryn connecting it to Kristof’s
point of individual vs. institutional. Due to the poor institution in the
Normandy area, the children suffered. An individual child could not succeed in
that institution.
Questions/Comments/Points to Share:
One more thing I wanted to say was this radio thing really made me think about being apart of a good institution as a teacher.
Great job at connecting the texts and activities we worked on in class. The different level of classes also stood out to me when listening. Especially when the students are talking about the AP classes giving them work that was about a middle school level. Giving underprivileged children under qualified teachers isn't going to help solve any problems.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was listening to the passage that quote also stuck out to me the most. That quote is so real and that why integration students is such an important thing. They can grow off each other instead of staying in the same place. Good job by the way!
ReplyDeleteI was impacted by that same quote as well, Nick. I agree that being able to have the choice to choose different academic levels of classes, such as advanced placement vs. honors vs. college prepatory, is definitely a privilege to have. I was shocked when reading about a typical day for high school senior in an underperforming school district, especially the fact that most of the teachers hired to instruct him as well as other students were not even qualified to do so or did not take their job seriously since they failed to be present in the classroom or construct a lesson plan. Many people are afraid of teaching in these school districts because of their so called "problems," but after being educated about them from our class readings and discussions and learning what its really like to work in these schools through service learning, I believe that they are the places that would benefit from young, committed qualified teachers, which is what I aspire to do in the future.
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