Doing school is a book that teaches us the troubling view of ways to seek high grades and future success. Faircrest has five students who are high in prosperity, hard workers and earn awards for being astonishing students. Denise Pope, a lecturer at the Stanford University School of Education, she brings an idea to track these students and distinguish what’s behind the success. For these students, they believe being able to understand and be ahead of the class you must multi-task, cheat, and scheme. These students have divergent lives, they act and learn in different ways. So how are teachers, students, and school systems going to keep up with these styles.…
First, when I look at the authors push to get an education I see in Richard Rodriguez’s essay that he was very motivated. He started as a young boy with an accent striving to learn more and attain knowledge whenever he could because he knew of the benefits. In the story Rodriguez says that he shifted away from family life to study more and learn more from his teachers. He wanted school rather than his uneducated family. In contrast, Mike Rose clearly didn’t want to be in school, he wanted an easy way out of things. Rose explains he was put in vocational classes by accident, but decided to stay in the classes with the lower level students. He explains how the teachers could care less about the student’s education which affected Rose because he saw himself and everyone as being average.…
In “I Just Wanna Be Average”, Mike Rose tells the story of his high school experience and how his Stanford-Binet IQ test score got mixed up with another guy with the same Sir name; he was subsequently placed on a vocational track; which was the lowest class placement you could be assigned. We hear about a few of the classes he took over the four years, English, PE, Spanish, and Voc. Ed. Rose tells us about one teacher in particular, Mr. MacFarland, his senior year college prep English class, and how he insured Rose that he was great and to do anything he desired. With the encouragement of one teacher, Rose was able to break out of the dead-end education and excel in college.…
Those outliers that are not benefited by standardized paradigms, or organization, may suffer at the cost. It may force an individual to recognize that they may have to choose between success and their own original ideas. One may realize that neither should have to be sacrificed, but once again, no matter what situation, not every individual can be catered to. With the constant pressure of needing to fit into the cookie-cutter lifestyle of standardization and hierarchy, there are those that are left behind. In Cathy Davidson’s “Project Classroom Makeover”, a little girl with green hair, unfortunately suffered at the cost of the narrow spectrum in school systems. Her passion for drawing had fallen back in importance behind the core classes taught in class. Because schools are geared, “implicitly and explicitly, to be college preparatory,” kids like her suffer the most (Davidson 63). Due to the sheer fact that a majority of the students will benefit most from a more standardized method of learning, she misses her opportunity to explore her own talents in regards to art. Furthermore driven into the investment banking career path, students in “Biographies of Hegemony,” are reminded that they are the absolute best, in terms of intellectual ability and social standing. He labels them as the, “cream of the crop,” and that they only “hire superstars” (Ho 174 and 175). For an anxious student worried about finding a job after college, entering an extension of Harvard or Princeton appears to be the best option for them. From there, they drop any previous dreams they had, and fully focus their attention toward attaining the lavish lifestyle they could easily have. By losing the motivation to be creative, Ivy League students and those that suffer at the cost of hegemony, both sacrifice their ingenuity to conform to the societal standards of hierarchy and…
The essay by Mike Rose made me really think about the purpose of education schools have to offer us. He talks about how a basic exam can determine your whole life; it made me really think about how accurate these tests really are. The purpose of this essay seemed to be how he feels students failures isn’t because of us, its because of the school system overall. He shares how the vocational track is basically portrayed as students who are not motivated to learn. The question he makes us think about is, why are these students so unmotivated to learn? He states how for the most part the teachers are the ones who are not motivated enough to teach them. Basically the teachers have to be there because it’s their job, and from the moment of the student’s first grade the teachers automatically think that they’re UN teachable. Students believe whatever the teacher says so they start believing that their stupid and so they wont try. Later on in the book, Rose talks about Jack MacFarland. He descries him as a unique person, because even though he’s a teacher he puts work to make students understand that all teachers are not the same.…
The story “I Just Wanna Be Average”, written by Mike Rose offers up a personal account of how a testing mistake early in his high school days could have changed the course of his life for the worse and how these events and those that followed solidified his perception of the educational system as an adult. The author tries to establish credibility by writing in a first-person narrative of his life as a teenager growing up in early 1960s Los Angeles and also with his complex sentence structure and big words as an adult in reflection of his life during that time period. This authority is also emphasized by the intro to the piece about his misfortunes as a teenager and his many accomplishments as an adult as an award-winning author and college professor. By putting such a glowing review about the author in front of the piece, it sets up the belief that what you’re about to read is righteous and true.…
In “The Gestures of Grace” the point is mostly about how a teacher can learn and grow in a classroom herself. Although some people think in a classroom the teacher is basically like the god of the class, she talks about how teachers should be more down to earth and compassionate towards their students. Overall the essay is very informative and descriptive about how she personally feels in the classroom. It goes even further in depth talking about her emotions she evokes in the class and talks about how some children communicate to each-other and to her (The teacher).…
“The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think--rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men"…
that all 7th and 8th graders would have to read. I think this would give some of them the hope that…
This week, the Attic’s high school was privileged to host Michelle Jones, President and Co-Founder of Portland, Oregon’s new progressive college, Wayfinding Academy. Although I could go on and on about this intriguing (and familiarly structured, for those of us here at the Attic!) school, what I want to focus on here is something Michelle told our kids. She left her position in traditional high education because, she said, she could envision an ideal college, and it looked different than that tradition. Alongside her colleagues and the students at Wayfinding Academy, she is now working to create that ideal.…
There must be a progressive approach to change our educational system to critique and address current shortcomings, failings, and discriminatory practices. The approach must be grounded in ideals of social justice, equality in education, and a dedication to facilitating educational experiences where all students reach their full potential as learners and as socially aware and active people. Teacher-education programs must adopt new ways to approach education and help either new teachers or experienced teachers redefine the environment in which students learn and students succeed. You must start with teachers who believe in this type of social change so they can support each others ideas, collaborate on change and make adjustments when approaches are not working. Creating bonds infuses energy into this type of effort so that teachers are equipped to take on established, failing programs and believe that they can learn from set backs. They should feel energized to forge on to reach their goals of developing learning programs for students that reflect their everyday challenges and find the seed of a learner in them and make them feel OK that they can be a student and not feel the pressure of their peers that it isn’t acceptable to succeed in school. The new design of a student program has to be creative, but still adhere to the mandates that oversee education systems. Kohl believes that his program at the University of San Francisco is succeeding in developing a new…
They always told me what I could improve on,” she says. “You hate them at first, because you actually have to work hard to be successful. But, when the praise comes, it really means something.” Irvine. In any event, those who give you the time to tell you what you did wrong to help do it right are the ones who you will remember. Throughout my high school years, I always thought I had it harder than the rest of my class being in special education classes because I always had to try harder than them to get a C+ when they would get an A+. To tell you the truth, in my high school, you did not see much grade inflation or you did not acknowledge it even was real, but in reality it was there for the athletes and the last name families named popular groups. On the other hand, the few teachers who did not inflate the grades students found more respect for them even thought it was not…
Kids start school at younger ages to a head start. Personalized tutoring for school age children is a big business. Tutors are in demand at colleges and universities. Children to young adults are given every advantage to get ahead in this very competitive world. The students in this story, Making the Grade, are indifferent to academic performance. They admit to not deserving the grade they are pleading for. It is more rewarding to these students to receive something for nothing. Personal achievement is forsaken to these students. Competition comes in the form of who can get the farthest for the most trivial. In college life the one thing that reflects most on personal success and effort is grades and without them nothing is…
I was no longer with neighboring students I had competed against in smaller elementary and middle schools- I was now against top students who had applied from other districts and neighborhoods. I was attending one of the largest schools in the district, and now the number of competition I had doubled from the amount it had been in previous years. It became even harder for me to keep up with my classmates; both those I had always been against, and the new faces of whom had equal if not greater academic talent. In my first two years of high school it was even harder for me to keep up with my peers. I had many sleepless nights, putting in double the amount of work of other students who had a better understanding of the material than I did. I became frustrated because I didn’t think it was fair- I didn’t understand why it was so hard for me. There were nights I wanted to abandon it all; I wanted to give up the rigorous curriculum because I believed I had no chance against students who had no problems. It was hard enough to succeed in my past with a smaller class, why should I try in an even larger group? Why should I suffer to barely keep up when I could be normal in a less demanding atmosphere? If I had listened to myself when I had these thoughts, I would not have eventually become able to take college-leveled classes. I would not be in the top eleven percent of my graduating class. I would not know that despite the nights of tears and stress, I would be thankful for the competition because it encouraged me to push harder. It triggered the part of me that had always wanted to succeed and the part of me that wanted to overcome the differences. What my first grade teacher saw in me might have been subtle and not justified by exam scores, but it was early signs of the determination that would not have become more evident without being challenged to work harder. The circumstances I faced growing…
In the education program at Bradley University, we had to spend hours observing and interacting with students throughout the Peoria area. Many of the schools I observed were low income, overcrowded, and as a result, a majority of the students were being left behind by the education system. In many of these students, I saw myself. These students had the ability to learn and truly yearned to learn, but because of their learning style they were being labeled by others as lazy and disconnected as I once was myself. I connected with these students, and I believe we learned a great deal from each other. I once again became aware of what I knew when I was younger, I had the ability and willingness to learn but I need to make the most out of every opportunity given to me. While my overall GPA was much lower during my first few years at Bradley University, I finished the education program with a GPA of 3.68.…