Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Monday, August 25, 2008
Friday, August 22, 2008
A Portal to Media Literacy
This is getting there on what I am thinking about in terms of what I want to do with the Brown and the education of our teens.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Opening clip naration
Parents are told, lead to believe and accept that schools and teachers have their child's / children's best interests at heart. (There are no doubt some teachers are doing their best with our students.) We trust the teachers' and school's authority, believing in a system that is supposed to help us raise our children. (A modern necessity since most of us need to work to support a family, we have to place our children in the care of others from a very early age). We can't watch them and teach them any longer, there is no school at work, no program of apprenticeship in the US work system for young children. We devalue learning that can be done in context. We fall pray to the belief that if we place our children in the hands of trained professionals they will turn out alright, they will learn the skills they need to survive in the modern world, the reading, the math, the analytical skills to make them good citizens who can make informed decisions, can take part in the civic leadership. If this is true then why are minorities lagging so far behind. Graduation rates for African American and and Hispanic and Latino Americans still hovers around 50% nationally.
As the parent of a minority child, one who is Icelandic/Irish and Haitian American I would like to explore my experience of minority education and the Minnesota school systems attempts to educate my son. From his first enrollment in a school in Minnesota he was an out cast. His teacher thought him too young for her third grade classroom. The result was a trip to special ed and testing to see what was wrong with him. He came out as well above average intelligence, but behind on writing, so he got six months of tutoring. With frequent communication with school officials and teachers, my son continued to fall behind. He couldn't preform, couldn't turn in the home work, couldn't fill out the planner, the only thing we could expect was that it would get harder. The teachers said he would not be prepared to go to junior high school. At home he was reading novels, solving complex math problems, engaging in discussions on politics, philosophy and learning about US and World history. By the time he was in junior high school he had build his own computer and continued to fail in school. For the longest time I trusted the schools, the teachers and the school officials, there was something he, my son, was doing not to fit in. At thirteen every night was a fight, a crying argument. An angry boy had taken over the child who asked questions about democracy, thought about why we spent money on things we wanted rather than focusing on the things we need. The light of learning was successfully turned off by being told he was bad, under-performing and over all just didn't belong. It became such that I got emails on a daily basis from my son's teachers about how bad he was, how he had failed.
As a parent it is hard to hear that your child is bad, especially when every where else he was a model child. He had plenty of friends, our back and front door always had children looking for my son, he babysat for neighbors, parents repeatedly told me that he was helpful in their homes, respectful and interesting to talk to, so where was the disconnect coming from? I realized after medicating him for a little over a year that the only result was a sullen angry child who still underperformed and didn't want to do anything. So I embarked on a search for the perfect school. Since we have limited resources I was forced to stay in the public school system, but luck for us we live in Minnesota the land of the charter school. (Every year at least five new charters are approved.) Working on a degree in Education made me aware of the different educational methods available and I found what I believed to be the ultimate solution to our educational problem, Montessori. Open education focused on educating the whole child and bringing out the student's learning and growth potential through guided learning rather than sitting behind a desk for six to eight hours a day. Only this school was just as bad. Teachers threw pencils at the students, told them to shut up, banished them from the classrooms when they felt the student had overstepped the bounds. My son often got called on for lack of attention and when pressed to explain what the teacher had just said would repeat back verbatim the lesson and then be told to leave the classroom. At least this school payed lip service to his apparent intelligence, but it still seemed to get him in trouble. Too much lip, too many smart answers, too much standing up for his and others rights landed him in the dean of students office, it became so that my son would check himself out and go to the dean's office to avoid the confrontation, he knew he was angry and would self monitor, but he was still failing. This school while espousing the Montessori method made the students attend block classes of two to two and a half hours each day. Teachers would group non performing student with other nonperforming students, and single out the “trouble makers”, the most vocal of all students.
It just so happened that these students were predominantly students of color, but the unique thing about all of these students was that they were the product of biracial relationships. Boy and girls raised by a white educated mother seeking the best opportunities for their children. These students were vocal, raised to speak up for themselves, knowing no one else would, encouraged to question and learn. More often than not my son would come home with some story of racial discrimination, harassment or being singled out. At first I thought that this was just a young man's attempt to understand himself and his place in the world, but as I spoke with more and more parents with similar experiences I began to understand that racism was alive and well and operating in our Minnesota schools. My son was not imagining that he was being judged and treated as a black man who frightened the teachers, by being vocal, tall, deep voiced and in search of equal treatment. He knew he was intelligent despite years of being told otherwise, yet he got comments like “You should have spent more time working on this than starting it the night before” for a project he worked on for three weeks or being failed for turning in a project at the end of the day because the two other students failed to do their work on time. These students were not even allowed to pick groups, but where rather assigned by the teacher who grouped the under and non performing students together, rather than splitting them up to help them on the way.
What education has my son gotten out of all of these experiences, that he doesn't measure up, can't perform and will never ever fit in. As a parent, I am highly disappointed in what this system purports to be education. Five schools, five different methods, teaching styles and for the first time ever my son is finally successful in a school that encourages critical thinking. He is believing in himself, he is using his research skills, self taught; he is writing poetry, composing music and finally will have the opportunity to take college classes before he graduates, because we found a school for “misfits.”
How many parents out there find themselves in the same or similar dilemmas? Many, I talk to many parents as part of my interest in developing modern and appropriate schooling for this century and beyond, but the experience leave a sour taste in many mouths and produces children who can not read, can not reason and will never feel valued in a society that criminalize them and penalizes them for wanting to learn to be free thinkers. We need to revolutionized education, find a way that speaks to all students not just one group, the ones who are willing to conform. The goal for our future systems should be to open a dialog with those whom the system has failed, from there we can begin to build the system that will successfully educate students to move into the 21st century.
As the parent of a minority child, one who is Icelandic/Irish and Haitian American I would like to explore my experience of minority education and the Minnesota school systems attempts to educate my son. From his first enrollment in a school in Minnesota he was an out cast. His teacher thought him too young for her third grade classroom. The result was a trip to special ed and testing to see what was wrong with him. He came out as well above average intelligence, but behind on writing, so he got six months of tutoring. With frequent communication with school officials and teachers, my son continued to fall behind. He couldn't preform, couldn't turn in the home work, couldn't fill out the planner, the only thing we could expect was that it would get harder. The teachers said he would not be prepared to go to junior high school. At home he was reading novels, solving complex math problems, engaging in discussions on politics, philosophy and learning about US and World history. By the time he was in junior high school he had build his own computer and continued to fail in school. For the longest time I trusted the schools, the teachers and the school officials, there was something he, my son, was doing not to fit in. At thirteen every night was a fight, a crying argument. An angry boy had taken over the child who asked questions about democracy, thought about why we spent money on things we wanted rather than focusing on the things we need. The light of learning was successfully turned off by being told he was bad, under-performing and over all just didn't belong. It became such that I got emails on a daily basis from my son's teachers about how bad he was, how he had failed.
As a parent it is hard to hear that your child is bad, especially when every where else he was a model child. He had plenty of friends, our back and front door always had children looking for my son, he babysat for neighbors, parents repeatedly told me that he was helpful in their homes, respectful and interesting to talk to, so where was the disconnect coming from? I realized after medicating him for a little over a year that the only result was a sullen angry child who still underperformed and didn't want to do anything. So I embarked on a search for the perfect school. Since we have limited resources I was forced to stay in the public school system, but luck for us we live in Minnesota the land of the charter school. (Every year at least five new charters are approved.) Working on a degree in Education made me aware of the different educational methods available and I found what I believed to be the ultimate solution to our educational problem, Montessori. Open education focused on educating the whole child and bringing out the student's learning and growth potential through guided learning rather than sitting behind a desk for six to eight hours a day. Only this school was just as bad. Teachers threw pencils at the students, told them to shut up, banished them from the classrooms when they felt the student had overstepped the bounds. My son often got called on for lack of attention and when pressed to explain what the teacher had just said would repeat back verbatim the lesson and then be told to leave the classroom. At least this school payed lip service to his apparent intelligence, but it still seemed to get him in trouble. Too much lip, too many smart answers, too much standing up for his and others rights landed him in the dean of students office, it became so that my son would check himself out and go to the dean's office to avoid the confrontation, he knew he was angry and would self monitor, but he was still failing. This school while espousing the Montessori method made the students attend block classes of two to two and a half hours each day. Teachers would group non performing student with other nonperforming students, and single out the “trouble makers”, the most vocal of all students.
It just so happened that these students were predominantly students of color, but the unique thing about all of these students was that they were the product of biracial relationships. Boy and girls raised by a white educated mother seeking the best opportunities for their children. These students were vocal, raised to speak up for themselves, knowing no one else would, encouraged to question and learn. More often than not my son would come home with some story of racial discrimination, harassment or being singled out. At first I thought that this was just a young man's attempt to understand himself and his place in the world, but as I spoke with more and more parents with similar experiences I began to understand that racism was alive and well and operating in our Minnesota schools. My son was not imagining that he was being judged and treated as a black man who frightened the teachers, by being vocal, tall, deep voiced and in search of equal treatment. He knew he was intelligent despite years of being told otherwise, yet he got comments like “You should have spent more time working on this than starting it the night before” for a project he worked on for three weeks or being failed for turning in a project at the end of the day because the two other students failed to do their work on time. These students were not even allowed to pick groups, but where rather assigned by the teacher who grouped the under and non performing students together, rather than splitting them up to help them on the way.
What education has my son gotten out of all of these experiences, that he doesn't measure up, can't perform and will never ever fit in. As a parent, I am highly disappointed in what this system purports to be education. Five schools, five different methods, teaching styles and for the first time ever my son is finally successful in a school that encourages critical thinking. He is believing in himself, he is using his research skills, self taught; he is writing poetry, composing music and finally will have the opportunity to take college classes before he graduates, because we found a school for “misfits.”
How many parents out there find themselves in the same or similar dilemmas? Many, I talk to many parents as part of my interest in developing modern and appropriate schooling for this century and beyond, but the experience leave a sour taste in many mouths and produces children who can not read, can not reason and will never feel valued in a society that criminalize them and penalizes them for wanting to learn to be free thinkers. We need to revolutionized education, find a way that speaks to all students not just one group, the ones who are willing to conform. The goal for our future systems should be to open a dialog with those whom the system has failed, from there we can begin to build the system that will successfully educate students to move into the 21st century.
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