BEDUC427 Journal - Week 6

Teaching is courageous.

If teachers cannot influence the world, who can? I have been thinking about Three Cups of Tea and how dramatic that story is. How the task is daunting, building schools in Pakistan and now Afghanistan. What Greg Mortenson is doing is hard and heroic, but I would argue that in some sense what public school teachers need to do in this country is harder and no less heroic. It is like the difference between physical and emotional abuse; you can see physical abuse, people come to the aid of the victim. Something needs to be done about it! That is Three Cups of Tea. With emotional abuse the suffering is also great, but not so apparent. That is what US public school teachers are up against. A system that seems to work, our kids go there everyday, and they all learn something whether part of the curricula or not). To pour resources into a public education system in the wealthiest country on Earth should be a no-brainer, but our culture of selfishness and the low status of our children, de-prioritizes education.

I think we are in this situation partly because of the detachment of the community from the schools, and the detachment of families from schools. The belief that educating our kids is the school's job, and not every one's responsibility is a 'slackers' approach to the future.

In Jean's article this week, The Challenges and Joys of Multi-age Classrooms, she talks about how multi-age classrooms reflect society in general, both in the family and in adult society. When building community in the classroom, having an age spread would be an advantage, as it would mirror the child's world, and make more sense to the children. I had never understood the value before. I see now the more a classroom can model the rest of the world, the better. A teacher has the opportunity to make that world better on a small scale, modeling social justice, thirty kids at a time. The classroom has to be relevant, to inspire change.

There are 2 reasons I think that education in this country could be on the cusp of revolution. First, we are a land of immigrants now more than anytime in the last 100 years, our neighbors no longer all look like us. As much as we are still a country of haves and have-nots, economic success is no longer a whites only club. The middle class is multi-racial. Secondly, because of communication, economies and the ecology, national borders are irrelevant and a little archaic. The world needs global solutions. What if we learned to be such good neighbors that war was no longer? I am really interested in the idea of the scale of the goal, being both local and global. Developing better neighbors, members of society and global thinkers is the work of teachers.

We must re-orient our values to make individual accomplishment (a tenet of American values) have more meaning if it is working for the general good of all. Take the greed out of individual accomplishment. I wonder is we will ever recover from the greed of the last 3 decades? I do believe with our current economic downturn, that there is a glimmer of opportunity to reset our national values.

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On another note, I am excited to be going to B.F. Day Elementary School for my placement interview next week. It is a very small school, only 1 1/2 fourth grade classrooms yet a burgeoning population in the lower grades. It is interesting to discover while doing the research on the website, that only 15% of the student population picked B.F. Day as their first choice of schools. This is a school that has always tried to do the right thing, I don't know why (greedy upper middle class neighborhood?) more parents don't pick B.F.Day first. I can't wait to see how that works from the inside!