Yes We Can

The article “Yes we can” had a much more positive tone than the previous article “Unemployment Training”. Instead of highlighting a number of negative aspects of the public school system it offers the idea that we can make a difference in the school system and these student’s lives. There are still some frightening statistics given, “And by the time Latino and African American students hit the age of 17, they have been taught to the same level as 13-year-old White students”. I noticed that it does not say how they score at that level but they are taught at that level.

Given the education gap between students of different race I was actually surprised to see that generally African American students enter kindergarten with slightly better reading skills than their peers. How do these students fall behind by the third grade? is the big question. What is happening to hold these students back? It is clear that some districts are more successful at teaching minority students like Charlotte, or New York. These districts had higher success rates than L.A. or D.C. because of better programs.

“When we teach children of color to high levels, they can and do achieve at high levels”. This shows that students generally live up to our expectations. If we have low expectations for a group of students they will likely achieve only what we expect of them but if we set the bar high for them they tend to rise up to the challenge. This is something every teacher must do with all of their students. I can expect the world from my students but if their other teachers don’t follow this method the students will have low expectations for themselves academically. This article does pose a realistic method to improve the status of the education gap. There are more methods to help this situation other than having higher expectations. The success in the NY school is likely do to the personal motivation the faculty puts on the students. “We push our kids to excel in all their classes. If I hear that a student is arriving at gym unprepared, or isn’t doing well in art, I’ll ask him about that” (Alicia Calabrese). Here you can see why students would be more motivated to go beyond high school and graduate from college.

Urban Ecology in East Hartford

So far in my internship we have created a few writing activities for the students to work on involving their acid rain lab. The idea is that we are supposed to make activities for them that are somewhat relevant to them and their daily lives. The school is also incorporated a new writing program known as the John Collin's writing program. It is expected to help them increase test scores as well as a better understanding of writing in every subject. I am curios to see how this program will affect the students test scores. This may be the question I want to ask for my project.

We have started to get into set some more specific goals in our internship. The three of us will work on different sections of the curriculum but will still collaborate and try to make solid connections with our different areas. I will start to focus more on the environmental science class which is a new area for me but I still find interesting. So most of the students I would be making lessons for are juniors / seniors. I have a few ideas that might get them interested in environmental science. An example would be how modifications to cars affect gas millage. I think I have a good amount of automotive knowledge to come up with some interesting activities.

One thing that I would need to keep in mind is that the article"What Science Teaching Looks Like" mentions how many class activities in the United States have little or no conceptual content. So I need to make sure my class activities have a good focus and are not only relevent to the students but to the content as well.