I thought that this video had a really interesting and thought provoking message. It points out the difference between classrooms from several years ago to classrooms of today. The part of the video that I found really interesting was the question that it left us with at the end. “Are we teaching them?” To me this question makes me think. What are we really teaching student’s. Is our world becoming so focused on technology and advertising that we are losing what we are really teaching students? As a future teacher, I will keep this in mind. We should be teaching them knowledge and values, not to be lifelong consumers as I discussed in a previous blog. Many things that we have learned in class so far have made me think about the way I want to teach. I’m still a couple years away from that, but I want to keep growing towards being a better teacher. I want to be a teacher who is looked up to and leaves children with good values and knowledge for their life. I think that teachers are very influential, especially at the elementary level, and need to always keep in mind just how influential they can be.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
"The Girl Who Silenced the World for Five Minutes"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQmz6Rbpnu0&feature=related
This video is titled “The Girl Who Silenced the World for Five Minutes. It has almost eight million views. We talked in class about the degree that children are listened to. After watching this I think that maybe children can make a difference. She points out that our parents didn’t have the same worries growing up as we do now. It amazes me just how much our history has changed in the last years. She also pointed out that we teach our children certain values in school, but we don’t model them in the real world. I had never really thought about this. Maybe it will take a child saying these things to make adults stop and think about it. The fact that this video has almost eight million views shows that maybe one child can make a difference. I thought it was a really powerful video. As a teacher, I have to keep this in mind, and know that I am instilling values and knowledge. I have to be very careful what values and knowledge I do leave my student with.
"Generation Boomerang" Young Adults Still Living at Home
Today in class we watched a documentary called “Generation Boomerang.” It was a video about the more recent phenomenon of young adults living at home or returning back home. One fact that I found really interesting was that 51 percent of 20-29 year olds in Canada still live at home. This video also discussed how life has changed since our generation’s parents were young. A lot of the time by the age of 21 they would be moved out, independent, and in many cases have a family. Things have definitely changed since then. We are a generation that relies more on our parents. While I do still rely on my parents for a lot of things, including financial support, I am moved out and in many cases fairly independent. My parents raised me to be independent, and this is the way I would also raise my own children. I don’t think living at home still at the age of 25 fosters a sense of independence. One exception to this is if your kids are attending school. In this situation, many young adults require financial assistance because most people simply can’t go to school and work enough to survive.
We were asked to reflect upon the statement that there are jobs out there that many young people don’t want to do, and that parents don’t push them to get these jobs. I think every job is a starting point, and having a job is better than not having a job. If someone is still living at home because they need to, it’s a different story than someone living at home because of laziness. I don’t think that parents should promote this sense of being able to have no responsibility and still be able to get by. This is not realistic and when they are forced into the real world they won’t be prepared.
With this being said, I do believe that parents need to be there in the years of early adulthood. The economy and job availability has changed since our parents were young, and the first years of independence are difficult. I think that a good mixture of support and encouragement to become independent are important. There are of course situations where moving home might be required and I do not look down upon living at home at all, I just disagree with living at home due to laziness.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Applying Haberma's Paradigms to Education
At the beginning of class we learned about Haberma’s three paradigms; empirical analytical, situational theoretic, and critical theoretic. These different points of view can be applied to many situations, including education. Education can be looked at from all of these perspectives and as a teacher it will be important to keep this in mind.
This link is to a website that supports the idea that students eating breakfast leads them to be better students. This website is using an empirical analytical or scientific approach to this aspect of education. Schools are even starting to implement free breakfast programs because of this idea. My high school implemented a program like this in the last three years that I attended.
This link is to a website that talks about the link between social skills and academic achievement. It concludes that they are linked and I found several other websites that shared this conclusion. Linking social skills to academic achievement is a situation interpretive way of looking at education. A situational interpretive view uses lived experiences and looks at things subjectively. While this point of view is situational interpretive, they use scientific thinking to come to this conclusion. This demonstrates that the paradigms are interconnected.
This link is to a website that takes a critical theoretical point of view on education. Critical theoretic takes the point of view that reality is concealed. While it is a less common way of looking at education, the point of view is still present.
Overall I think it is important to keep these three paradigms in mind when entering the field of education. There is different ways at looking at every situation. As a teacher I might apply a empirical approach to some of my teaching strategies, or a situational interpretive approach to others. Or in some cases the paradigms can work together.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
The Importance of Peer Groups
One of the discussion questions this week asked us to think about what teachers and parents need to understand about adolescent peer groups. I think that this is an issue that teachers need to consider very carefully. At some point in many children’s lives their peer groups will become extremely important to them. Reflecting on my own childhood, my peer group became very important to me. They became a huge influence in my life. I don’t think there is a specific age that this transition occurs and from my observations it is different for every child. I think that this will greatly affect me as a teacher. I’ll have to learn how to deal with the importance of peer groups in my class room. As we discussed in class, impressing ones peer group can become more important than listening to the teacher.
One strategy I think I could use as a teacher would be to use the importance of these peer groups as an asset. Implementing group work could be a way to do this. Some of the statistics that I found online indicated that some studies have shown that students that work in small groups tend to learn more of what is being taught and are more satisfied with the class. When I was working in a grade two classroom in my first year, I noticed that the teacher I was working with arranged the kid’s desks in groups of about four to six. She would also change the desks around every week and mix up the kids. This strategy seemed to get the kids working together and working with everyone in the classroom, not just their peer group.
http://chasewilsoneducation.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/peer-pressure.jpg (link for a picture)
This leads me to consider one of the possible challenges that peer groups bring about, exclusion. I chose the photograph above because I thought that it demonstrated exclusion. Wanting to be part of a peer group can become as important as the influences of a peer group. When I was working in the grade two classroom I noticed this. Exclusion can become a distraction and consume the child’s attention. To me, this furthers the idea that peer groups are extremely important to children, even at very young ages. I think that my mentor teacher’s strategy of switching the desks around was a really good idea. It seemed to get all of the children working together and working with everyone.
Overall, I believe that teachers and parents need to understand just how important students peer groups are, and learn different strategies to deal with them. As a teacher this is one of the challenges that I will have to learn to understand and work with in my classroom.
http://teaching.berkeley.edu/bgd/collaborative.html (I got some information from this website)
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
"Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood" -Video
I thought that this video was really interesting, and spoke on a lot of the topics that we discussed in class. It discussed how advertising towards children has changed drastically, even since the 1970’s. The video talked about how from the moment children are born they are advertised to. Companies are trying to turn them into “lifelong consumers,” or “super consumers.” The video also discussed how children are at the time of their life that they are forming their values and attitudes. It reinforced the idea that boys are advertised to one way and girls another. In advertising, movies and books, boys are shown that they need to be “tough, strong, and ready to fight,” and girls are shown that they should be “pretty, sexy, and that how they look determines their value.”
I thought that the video raised a lot of interesting questions and concerns to do with the amount of advertising that is directed at children. One question that I found interesting was, “at what point should children and families take precedence over corporate profit?” I think that this issue deserves a lot of thought. Companies now have the ability to advertise to kids almost everywhere they go, and they take full advantage of this opportunity that modern technology has given to them. But the question raised in the video was how is all this advertising going to affect children in the long term? The video seemed to come to the conclusion that it is not going to lead to good effects, and I agree with this. Through my observations of children, I have noticed that from an increasingly young age children are concerned with brand names, and the next best toy. We as a society are causing this, and I don’t think that it is a good thing.
Another quote in the video really stood out to me as the general message that the video is trying to convey. “We have become a country that places lower priority on our children’s emotional, cognitive, social, even spiritual development then it does on training them to be little consumers.” I think that most people might not even be aware that this is occurring, but it is to a great extent. I don’t think that most parents would want this to be happening, and perhaps through greater awareness on this issue they would rethink some of the values that are being imposed onto their children. To me a child’s emotional, cognitive, social and spiritual development should be way more important than teaching them to consume. Entering into the teaching profession, I think it is important to consider issues like this, and take measures to work against it. In my experience, a teacher can have a world of impact on kids, and they can be an important figure in instilling values into a child’s life. This is a tremendously huge responsibility, but also a tremendously huge opportunity, that I, as a teacher, hope I remember and use in my classroom.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Change in the Care of Infants
Today in class we discussed how the care of infants has changed throughout history. I think that a lot has changed when it comes to how infants are cared for and viewed. Wet nursing is one topic in particular that we discussed has virtually disappeared in recent decades. In history wet nursing was viewed as a symbol of status. People were considered of higher status if they could have a wet nurse. However, there were still people who opposed to this method, and I agree with these people. One main reason that people in earlier times opposed to wet nursing was because of the higher mortality rate among infants that was a result. I don’t think gaining status is worth putting your child at a greater risk. It is difficult to understand why wet nursing became so popular; it was a different time, and people had vastly different values. Status was high at the top of the list. As science became more involved in the medical profession, the popularity of wet nursing declined. As discussed in class the medical profession began to replace traditional female lore. I think that this change in thinking was a good thing.
Status is still very important today, but people show it in a different way. Status is shown through things like how early you start to educate your infant. In our groups we discussed how toys for infant development play more of a role than they ever have. Parents are so focused on educating their children from the moment they are born, and in some cases even while they are still in the womb. Things like baby Einstein are focused at educating infants, the idea is that you can never start educating your child to early. Another thing that we discussed in our group was the recent increase in the use of formula or powdered milk as opposed to breast feeding. Mothers now have this choice, a choice that they didn’t have before. I think that this combined with the increase in the influence of doctors and science is what led to the decrease in wet nursing. Now, when I think of wet nursing, I think that it is a strange and outdated practice. I couldn’t imagine someone hiring a wet nurse these days. Parents are also much more concerned with making a connection with their children as early as possible. They want their children to be the best that they can be, so the idea of sending your child with a wet nurse would not be an appealing idea. These are some of the factors that I can imagine have lead to the decline in wet nursing, and also other changes in the care of infants.
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