Speaking in a Critical Voice Discussion Reflection

Marilyn Page brings up some very good points her reading, but she was a little harsh when she said that Stan and John should not be teachers. In an ideal world I would say a good percentage of teachers in our system should not be teachers. This just shows the need for reform of our current teachers.

Her points about critically thinking are the way we should go about this reform. Most teachers are afraid to go against administrative requirements. Does this mean that it is their fault? Maybe our focus should not be on teacher reform but on the administrative requirements themselves. Is is so wrong to choose your job over choosing to give a better education? Some would say yes, but what if those teachers have families that rely on those job's wages?

My worst teaching experiences have been at both extremes. One extreme is a teacher who strictly follows administrative education. Some teachers can get away with this by making the information fun, but some teachers lose sight of what learning really is. The latter usually just lecture and not much is retained. The other extreme are the older teachers who don't care anymore. Not all older teachers are like this, but some go off on tangents about this and that and because they've been there so long the administration can't really do anything about it.

Critically thinking can be effective in many ways. It can be used like my example of the teacher who made the administrative requirements fun. This might have been what Jenni from the reading tried. Also, critically thinking teachers could try to challenge administration and get the requirements changed. I've heard of this working in some cases. Some teachers don't even try.

This goes back to the idea in our floating foundations reading. Without critical thinking, education can not evolve with our changing environment. There are critically thinking teachers out there, but I believe Marilyn was right in her writing to ask for more. I say we could take it a step further and ask for administration to start critically thinking about their own curriculum requirements more often in our changing education system.

"Speaking in a Critical Voice" blog assessment

It doesn't surprise me that there are teachers that have beening teaching for years and individuals with doctorates in education that don't know how to think or assess critically. In fact, I think most individuals have come across a teacher just like in the piece "Speaking in a Critical Voice" explains. They follow what's expected of them and handed down to them from their supperiors with little regard to if certain methods of teaching work for a particular class or not.

I can recall, one of the worst teachers I have come across, trying to get our class to discuss Julius Caesar. The class repeatedly was silent for, not just days, but weeks at a time. No one wanted to answer her questions, not only because the experience was almost dehumanizing, but because no matter an individual's answer or import on the story, it was never a correct answer in her mind. She refused to look at the story from different perspectives, granted not every perspective of the story is justifiable. She wanted our answers in specific words, the problem was she wanted the answers in HER words.

It's the teachers that use critical thinking and teaching methods in their classrooms that get students to learn and REMEMBER important information. They can view education from a student, teacher, principle, or even parents' perspective. They are flexible as well as knowledgable, which makes for better learning for any kind of student. Although flexible, they must also have a strong basis of what they believe education should be and how and what knowledge should be taught. This makes critical thinking crucial to education.

Speaking in a Critical Voice

I'm amazed that some people have no idea how to think critically. I guess I've always just assumed that thinking critically is just something that comes naturally but after reading this article, I'm starting to see that it's not. I think it's horrible that some teachers don't teach critical thinking and it's ridiculous that some teachers don't even know what it is. How are students supposed to go out in the world and take what they've learned in school to succeed when all they're learning is facts.
Towards the end of my high school, the board decided to enforce a new teaching plan to enhance student's critical thinking. Whether it was in english or history or math, it applied. In english, for example, we would read a piece of literature and then take a few minutes to write about how that work related to our life, another book that we've read, and the world. This new activity was able to push students to think outside the classroom and in turn, learn how to critically think.

I think it is interesting that people want to change the way the SAT's are layed out, but i dont agree with the grading of the essays. I think that it is unfair to tell somebody that in order for them to get a good grade on an essay it needs to be "long winded and predicatable". Alot of the time when kids are in an english class the teacher will say "quality is better than quanity" and I fully belive that with writing it is better to be unique than to do someting that everydody else does.
Thinking back when I took the ACT junior year, on the eassay portion of the test when they said it had to be "enough supporting essays" i felt like my writng watered down my arguement. If I could have just written striaght to the point, but still written enough, my writing would have been much more sophisticated. Also, with standarized testing I think students feel pressure to write more than what their neighbor is writing, but the truth is, what one person writes in a paragraph, another can write even better in a sentence. So overall their focus on length is unfair, and they should be more focused on the content.

This article was interesting to read and shows how education is always changing. I never took the SAT, but I took the ACT, which had a writing portion. I also took the AP Literature test.For both of these tests, we were taught to write in a specific way giving concrete details with a thesis, topic, and concluding sentence. We had to use specific evidence to support our claims and use fluent language.

The article remarks that the people who earn a 6 out of 6 have earnest, long-winded and predictable essays. In my opinion, making the writer conform to certain ways of writing is restricting. Not everyone can write in this type of way but can still be considered excellent writers. In my view, standardized testing doesn’t really account for true talent in writing. There are so many types of genres to write in and only one type is used on these tests.

On the other hand, I can see why the tests would use this type of essay. Later in life, this is the writing most people are going to come in contact with, and it is important to be a decent writer. It is hard to suggest a medium for this problem but I do think something should be changed because it doesn’t separate the best writers from the others.

Shakespeare vs the SAT

Two years ago, I took both the SATs and ACTs, as well as took a prep course for the SAT. During the course, my friend and I goofed off the whole time, went to Starbucks during break, and laughed and laughed and laughed. We tried to make the teacher play a game once, "Stools", a game that our american lit/creative writing/AP lang teacher had our class play every Wednesday -- the guy whose had most influence on my writing to date.

The course didn't stress me out, and neither did the physical tests. I didn't take it seriously enough, though, as well as I handled most of my education up to now. I was a floater. I considered going to a concert the night before the ACT. I did not see the tests as something that could hinder myself, of course, only I can do that. I received my scores and immediately knew I could have done better. It doesn't effect my life whatsoever now. It never really did. It's just nice to know it's there.

And then it was senior year when I took AP Language & Composition. In the class we wrote all types of essays, my teacher chose themes for the different ones, we had "I believe", the fear paper, our soapbox speech (what we really had to say in that moment in our lives). Even more, we practiced rhetorical analysis weekly. It was hard to position myself into this course, especially being a lazy senior, added with being the floater that I was. And when I took the AP exam, I took it seriously, but I was safe. And this will get me to my point.

I was talking to friends in the course (although you're not supposed to - don't sue me College Board!) about the test, and one of them told me that he decided to write a satire for one of the prompts. It was brilliant, and I didn't even think of going there. I wanted to be safe. I could guarantee myself a passing grade, but not a perfect 9, but also not a 1. I was floating, still.

With this in mind, as I read the Atlantic article "Would Shakespeare Get Into Swarthmore?", I immediately thought of what I felt when I took these tests junior and senior years of high school, but couldn't articulate about them. The essay portions were boring; you had to write an ordinary, lackluster essay to get an above-average score. In addition, Katzman, Lutz, and Olson screamed and begged, "do not write boring things!" with their really clever use of rhetoric. The article contained great satire (I mean, giving the Unabomber a 6 isn't ironic, right?) , and I could not stop nodding my head in agreement. I rarely took risks in high school that I should have, and try to do so as often as possible now.

So I am here to spread this: do not write boring things. It is the same with days in a life, do not do boring things. If not, are you really living?

Response to "Would Shakespeare Get Into Swarthmore?"

What an interesting change to the SAT! Well, I actually never took the SAT because all the schools I applied to accepted the ACT since that is more common in the Midwest. However, I have heard stories of how difficult the SAT can be. From what I just read, it sounds like the College Board just made the SAT even MORE difficult and disappointing. Their ideas are great, but not fulfilling to the students taking the test.

I personally feel they have removed some key concepts from the test that sounded very important to me (like the analogies), although I do approve of the addition of an essay to the test. Writing is essential to college preparation and a measure of one's preparation. Students from my high school who graduated and went to college told the teachers after a year of college that the one thing teachers needed to focus on more was 'writing'. Because of that, In each class we diverted the course plan every once in a while to focus on a writing project or some type of assignment that emphasized the importance of writing in each subject, including Math or Physics. It was pretty helpful.

However, I'm calling it difficult because of the following essays they list on the page from professors who receive '3's, '2's and '1's. Wow, really? They could be just showing us a random selection, and that the majority of the essays they received from educators could be 5s and 6s, but wow! The essay that received a '1' made me laugh. It made no sense whatsoever, although it seemed very thought-provoking. However, if I was only given "1 to 2 minutes each" to look over an essay, I'd give it a '1' also. It was too complicated to understand for someone who is generally looking for a mainstream prompt.

It is disappointing because they are discouraging students from being creative on their SATs. Having no "flair" or rhetorical language in an essay calls for general, typical essays instead. If the prompt is only one to two sentences, how do you expect a nervous high school student to write a well-organized, competent essay if they cannot be creative in the process? It's simple -- I would die. So, while I approve of the addition of an essay question to the SAT because of the emphasis it places on writing, I'm not sure they have the grading concept completely right yet. They should be more focused on making sure the student can address the prompt and derive an idea from it, even if they use rhetorical language and creative strategies to do so. I'm glad I never had to take the SAT!