Text or no text

Text or No Text

I cannot believe that legislature would ever think about taking curriculum books out of the classroom and replace them with computers.  Many situations can occur while on a computer.  The problems are endless, unless you know how to navigate the programs or even just the internet.  Books are primary sources.  You don’t need power to run a text book.  Power of the brain is the only thing that a book needs to turn on.  I have dropped many books on the ground and kicked them, try that with a computer.  I would rather read a book, than look at a blinding irritating computer screen.  I know this is the new world of technology but come on people, we at least need to keep some things old school.  Here is another thought books cost less than computers.  We can keep computers at our students desks, just as well as keeping a book for one student per desk per class.    

behavioral strategies

Teachers often use behaviorist strategies in cases that have to do with discipline.  From my experiences from school, discipline is the most often used behavioral strategies, or a negative reinforcement.  In my homeroom class the teacher would turn off the lights and not let us watch Channel 1 until the class was silent.  This worked most of the time.  The stimulus was all electricity was enabled until the correct response was made, being quiet.  There are some cases in which teachers use positive behavioral strategies.  I had a Social Studies teacher who would allow us to collect bonus points by bringing in 5 articles, one per day, to help raise the student’s grade.  The stimuli, positive reinforcement, were the bonus points.  The correct response, if the child would want bonus points, would be to read an article from a newspaper.  There are many behaviors in classrooms that a teacher is going to encounter.  In order to maintain the proper classroom environment teacher should use positive and negative reinforcements.      

issues of language

I gathered many ideas of different stereotypical attitudes towards the way people talk from our reading. Everyone’s dialect is different in many regions.  First and foremost, you should never judge intellect without getting to know the person individually.  Why would a teacher pass judgment on a student for having any type of accent?  How could anyone say a person could not educate themselves because of the lack of skills to communicate with “standard English?”  The English language is one of the hardest languages to learn, let alone to read and write it.  Just like the girl who didn’t understand the concept of silent reading.  Or the child who knew he wrote a word, but didn’t understand what he had written.  I still have trouble reading and writing proper grammar.  It is a shame that some countries do not have enough funding to provide a good education for its citizens, just as the villagers in El Salvador.  The English language changes everyday.

            In my opinion, poverty is the biggest leading factor of why children to do get the adequate education they need.  Poverty causes social, psychological, and behavioral problems to name a few.  Lower class families do not have the money for leisure books, newspapers, and other reading materials.  In the educational process parents must provide enough time to help the child at home.  Lower income families, judging from statistics, do not spend the allotted time for at home education.  Middle to upper class families buy books and give enough attention to their kids, one, because if they are middle to upper class, the parents do not want their children to grow up and be the kinds of people who are being stereotyped in these passages.  Reading these passages about Jenny and Donny gave me a realization of how true these statistics are.  Ms. M should have been viewed by the board, just as well as the other teachers who passed Donny “just because.” There are other things that can be done, but that is another subject. Children who come from these uneducated societies do not know how to get out of them.  “It is believed that they “just don’t have it” as far as intelligence and or the will to learn, to achieve, to move out of their impoverished conditions go.” (133)  The only low income children who develop those skills of reading and writing, there must be some type of motivation for the child to strive in a world of knowledge.

            It should never go as low as saying this person lacks intelligence because of the way they use their individual dialect to have a personal identity.  “For example, the Boston dialect of the Kennedys or the southern dialect of Jimmy Carter are never pointed to as evidence of cognitive and linguistic deficit.”(133)  I live in the country and I see poverty everywhere I look.  I talk to people who have thick country accents.  These people are educated enough for their life styles they love, simple.  So people have a draw in their voice and some have speech impediments.  They are all good people, through and through.  I know this individual who did not graduate from high school.  This individual also has a difficult problem with reading, he may be dyslexic or have another impairment.  My point is, his cognitive thought process is more active than any book smart person if have ever met.  Also, his problem solving skills are phenomenal.  He can take a part anything, from cars, to houses, and all kinds of electrical devises and fix them.  That is something an educated person could not do without reading a book.  I believe that many people have street smart characteristics that help them overlap their lack of education.  In my opinion, sometimes book smart people are the most ignorant people I have ever met.  And they talk with perfect “standard English.”

            My last thought would be “No one “talks” like written Language.  Everyone uses fragmented syntax different pronunciation patterns, and different types of vocabulary words when they talk as compared to when they read and write.”(137)   Teachers should not judge their students by their “Nonstandard, socially marked dialects…to prevent people from learning to read and write.”  Our teachers out there must understand that the children we are teaching today are going to run our government in the future.  We need every child in America to be educated and prepared to enter the world after public schools.  Who is going to run our country when we are older?  

metacognition

Why is metacognition essential for good learning?

Metacognition is extremely important in order to retrieve and remember what learned.  Through the information process, thinking about thinking, helps understand the problem.  Long and short term memory plays an important role gathering, remembering and retrieving information.  In the middle of this is, “control process, is the metacognition process.   We need to realize what is happening while our brains are controlling thought while learning. 

http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/geography/pointingnsew.htm

mountaineer

Is our way of life unique?

            West Virginia is a state the does not get much positive recognition.  I was born in Wetzel County, West Virginia.  My father got stationed in Norfolk, Virginia when I was 2 year old, and we moved to there.  I don’t remember West Virginia as a child, of course I was too young.  The first time I remember my mother mentioning West Virginia, I had always remembered it as Western Virginia.  I grew up in white suburbia.  We ate at the dinner table.  Our clothes were always washed.  My mother taught us how to use silver and helped us grasp the concept of religion.  I was also given opportunities that a middle class family would grow up in.  Things happened in my life and I had to move back to where I was born, Paden City, West Virginia.  It was a huge culture shock to me.  For one, there were no other races in my home town but white.  The Ku Klux Klan still had members there.  My clothing style, my accent, and their actions were different from what I had been used to.  It seemed everyone shoved me into an outcast society, pretty much ostracized.  It wasn’t until about 2 years later I had assimilated myself into their culture.  I noticed everyone had family ties.  Everyone knew everyone in town.  People in the town new we were from the beach so they just assumed, like I assumed, we were all different.  That wasn’t the case though.  I was a naturally born West Virginian.  After the town people found out that I was born in the same hospital as most of my new forming friends, I was accepted.  I was invited to many homes for cook outs, which were just a little different from what I was used to.  They were eating deer steak and deer burger.  Also, I learned my favorite cultural sport of West Virginia, “muddn.”  Family life is the biggest tradition that I was aware of.  Heck the longer I live here the more my accent changes to the West Virginia slang.  I love it. 

Understanding the stereotype

            I remember growing up at the beach and thinking about West Virginia, knowing that my dad’s mother and father lived here.  I used to make fun of these people because that ate spaghetti sandwiches.  My brothers and I grew up saying only “hicks” and “rednecks” ate spaghetti sandwiches.  That was one stereotypical attitude I can think of.  I always thought that “Western Virginians” had no teeth, no shoes, dirty clothes, and always thought of inbred yokels.  When I first came to West Virginia these people had more racism or stereotypical attitudes than I did.  They hated me for being an outsider.  I used to have to run home from school so I would not get beat up by the local bullies.  They used to scream, “go back to your own town.”  And I remember saying, “Those stupid hicks are mean.”  As the years progressed I was eventually accepted by them.  I guess the realized I could take a beating.  Now everything about me loves this state.  I get excited when I hear her name.  Actually, West Virginia’s name was going to be Vandalia.  I love that many important people are from this state.  It doesn’t bother me about fictitious characters.  I enjoy it, because it gets people to think about our state. Not very many people do, if they are not from here.  Another cultural tradition would have to be the love for West Virginia as their state.  Every family that is true West Virginian would fight for this state until death.  Many families lost sons in every war.  Because in every war there was one West Virginian soldier in battle.  There is “poor white trash” everywhere in America, not just in West Virginia.  You know what they say, “You take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.”