MisEducated
The United States is a country where for the most part, even those living in extreme poverty have a higher standard of living than peoples around the world. However, the achievement gap is growing ever more, and the failures of the public education system to provide for America's citizens can no longer be ignored. This is my way of putting ideas out there about what needs to be addressed and how things can change.
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Photo reblogged from Roller Rink
Officially a TFA alum. I survived. #proud of the #achievements of myself and my peers
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Quote reblogged from teaching literacy.Training teaches how to carry out a specific task more efficiently and reliably. Education, on the other hand, opens and enriches a person’s mind. To train a person, you need know nothing about who they really are, or what they love, or why. Education reaches out to embrace the whole person. Historically, we have treated money as a matter of training, rather than education in its wider and more dignified sense.What the philosophy of education teaches us about worrying less about money. (via explore-blog)
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- Jonathan: Ms. Sophie, I'm not going to school next year!
- Me: Really?
- Jonathan: Nope! I'm going on vacation. Vacation to the beach water park.
- Me: Are you? What will you do there?
- Jonathan: Well... I'll go swimming and play in the sand at the beach and then go down the slide and ride the rides. They make the best hot dogs there and you can have as much ketchup as you want! And...
- Angelieze: Well I'm going to school next year! But I won't be in preschool, I'm going to go to kindergarten!
- Jonathan: I'm not going to kindergarten, I'm going on vacation!
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I wonder this sometimes. I haven’t been fortunate enough to have easy access to technology in my classrooms as of yet (this year I have a SmartBoard in the room, but no computer so it’s pointless). I do have a personal iPad that I use with students sometimes to do number/letter recognition, or for those students who need practice with writing. I’ve also recently discovered some great patterning apps. However, it is exceptionally difficult to wade through all of the apps in the Apple App Store, especially because there is no way to indicate that you are looking specifically for pre-k apps. Additionally, once you’ve found the apps, there’s no way to know which ones are good until you’ve downloaded them which means that I am unwilling to download paid apps, even though they may be better.
Solutions?
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Even before sequestration, federal spending on health care services, research and training had fallen by $25 billion in 2012 from 2011. Housing, food, nutrition and other income assistance programs for the poor were cut by $28 billion. State governmental aid was reduced too. In Maine, the state government had cut aid to Head Start to $71,000 from $360,000 last year before sequestration reduced Midcoast Maine Community Action’s budget by $135,000 this year, said Sue Kingsland, director of child and family services at Midcoast Maine, which runs Head Start programs. Tiny North Whitefield, Me., lost its Head Start center to the state cuts. Pejepscot’s will fall to the federal cuts. “There are a lot of needy people out there,” Ms. Kingsland said.
Sequester Leads to Creative Stopgap Measures - NYTimes.com
This effects me not only as a Head Start teacher and an advocate for early childhood education, but also because my boyfriend is from Midcoast Maine and these numbers directly reflect what is happening for members of his family.
As much as I dislike delayed air travel, it seems absurd to be mitigating the effects of the sequestration in the case of air traffic controllers but not in the case of Head Start…
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This was an incredibly interesting read for me. Over the last two years I have a number of students who have either already been diagnosed, or (in my opinion) should have been diagnosed with ADHD, however this piece directly addressed some of what those students may be dealing with instead.
Parents and teachers are eager for students with attention and behavioral issues to be given the ADHD label, hoping that medication and possibly therapy will help to address behavior and success inside and outside of the classroom. ADHD diagnoses give some of the benefits of LD lables (longer test times, for one) but do not necessarily have the stigma of other LDs. At an older age, students and young adults have a vested interest in being diagnosed because it is “easier” to do well when taking certain ADHD medications. However, what if we all started getting the right amount of sleep? Would so many people still have symptoms of ADHD?
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This is a Slideshare presentation on Race to the Top (RTTT) I created for a class I’m taking this semester called “Foundations of American Education”. Each student was assigned a topic to prepare a lesson around at some point during the semester. Because it is an online class and is tied to online discussion that takes place in the class, it was to be shared online and needed to have a variety of multimedia (video, links, etc…) components.
I really enjoyed doing the research for this lesson, and learned a lot about RTTT. Check it out and let me know what you think.
