An Interesting Article About Teaching

If any of you are interested in teaching, this is an interesting article about what makes a great teacher. From our in class-writing, it seems pretty clear what makes a bad teacher. However, this article seems to suggest that defining a good teacher is much more difficult.

Useful Links

If any of you are interested in learning more about the achievement gap, here is a link to the study that the New York Times refers to, and here is a link to a study about the 'excellence' gap. Both provide interactive, state-by-state comparisons.

Response to Articles About Racial Gap

After reading these articles, I was shocked at the statistics. I didn't realize Wisconsin really had the widest gap between black and white students in academics. Stereotypically, I would have assumed the South would have had the largest gaps. I was also surprised that the principals in Wisconsin were even shocked. I felt as if these three articles merely just stated the same thing, that Wisconsin and more specifically, Milwaukee, had the largest gap. I don't feel as if there was a real explanation or an effort to discover why Wisconsin more than any other state. The last article mentions open enrollment, but does that really explain why our gap is much wider than others? I don't know what else to say besides I agree with Shawn in that we need to focus on the education programs mainly in the Milwaukee area along with Madison where the African American populations are highest.

Gap Wisconsin

At the beginning of the semester, I went to the Morgridge Center for Public Service to find an opportunity to become involved in community work. Volunteer opportunities in Madison are plentiful, especially in reference to tutoring. A special program for tutoring, Schools of Hope, is one of the largest volunteer programs. The program sounded fine, as I quickly turned into the application, and waited.

A few days later, my phone rang and an interview was set up. The interview was intended so I could be become more accustom to the mission of the program. Schools of Hope is a volunteer opportunity for students to be tutors at schools with a large minority population in the student body. The goal of the program was to improve the racial gap in academia. I learned that Wisconsin had one of the worst academic racial gaps in the entire nation.

I was shocked. Wisconsin. Really?

Reading the articles confirmed this incomprehensible fact. Wisconsin has a lot of work to do to improve its academic institutions. Improvement of urban schools should be the first problem addressed. The majority of Wisconsin's African American residents live in the Milwaukee or Madison areas. Improving these two school districts would improve the gap numerically.

But that is just a number. A conscientious effort should be made to improving racial discrimination within the classroom. Although subtle, something is prohibiting some of Wisconsin's citizens from achieving an average education. The problem should be investigated further, and poses many questions. Questions that need to be answered.

Something interesting was the degree of shock that was implied when the largest gap did not come from the South. I feel that those problems are in the past, and now racial discrimination should be viewed as a national problem.

Response to A Conversation with Lisa Delpit

The most interesting part I took from this Q&A was that teachers can't just "give us the secrets". For example, it is not a teachers job to tell us the answers, but to lead and guide us to find the answers for ourselves. Lisa tells us that it is the teacher job to make the map and provide it. If the students cannot realize this for themselves, especially younger students, sometimes parents or other outside sources are brought in to evaluate. The teacher may be at fault, but is it right to let an outside source evaluate? Through Lisa's experiment with the class that was lectured to by one teacher and split into discussion groups by another, we see that we cannot rely on outside sources to evaluate a teacher's methods. The students all talked about how the lecture was interrupted by their teacher himself where the outside source saw it as being more involved with the students; but did the students really learn? The students felt gave the split up discussion class high marks, while the outside force saw it as lazy teaching. This shows that evaluations show more or less be left up to what the students themselves have learned and not how they were taught. Also, another main point I took from this article was that no matter what your social status is the way you're taught should not be effected. There should be a more personal, maybe even a cultural, reason to shift the lesson.

Response to "A Conversation w/ Lisa Delpit"

I think that this article covers a lot of topics that need to be addressed between teachers, students and parents. Specifically, I find that Delpit's ideas about culture within writing might be controversial to some, but can be very helpful to others. She emphasized that people write differently from each other in order to better communicate, but this is because of our different experiences and backgrounds. She then went on to explain that many teachers expect less from students because of their own personal situations, such as poverty, or because they aren't up to the same standards as the rest of their class, or other kinds of set backs. Throughout the article, Delpit makes the point that teachers should use techniques and methods that focus on what students need to learn and know within their writing. She also speaks about how teachers, students, and parents should communicate with one another in order to find out what those needs are. She explains that some students may need more help than others, a point with which I completely agree. Upon reading Delpit's conversation, I agreed with many of the remarks she made. I think they could really be useful with childrens' learning experiences of writing, especially students who come from such diverse standpoints and cultures.

Response to "A Conversation"

I thought Lisa Delpit’s idea of teaching from a standpoint of the “culture of power” was an idea that most don’t think about when thinking about the equality of education. I had never really given this topic much thought, coming from a small town that was not very diverse, but I think she raises a good point. Many teachers are very systematic and teach by the book, or so to speak, instead of creating their lessons according to the abilities of their learners. There is an assumed cultural understanding that young students are thought to have, and in many cases, do not. It should not be the case that minority students are more susceptible to fall behind academically because the majority of teachers, Caucasian females, only fully understand their own culture. Classrooms should be more universal and revolve around the students’ needs to give everyone a fair shot at academic success.