Week+6+Reflective+Journal

After viewing the video "Using Technology to Understand How the Brain Learns," I admired how the community in Florida embraces the use of technology in their schools. They even support it with a sales tax increase. I also agree with the school's basic philosophy of placing student learning above test scores. We need more of that. They place more emphasis on how to learn rather than how to pass a test. Their teaching encompases many different learning styles. I also agree with the idea of dimmed lighting and the soothing water sound. I have a fountain at home I may try in my room if I can keep paper wads out of it.

One concern that our team is having is that our district, not our building in is district improvement. One of our members must go to all day meetings and then bring back more things for the rest of the staff to implement. I really don't know how much more room that I have on my plate at this time. I am growing tired of hearing about the curriculum maps. I have mine done and in my own way I know that I am covering everything that I need to. These students are not machines and neither are we. What works for one group of students one year, may not work the next. So get off it already, some of our central office people have not been in a classroom for years, and I think that it is wrong to impose their ideas upon us when they don't have a clue what its like in the real classroom.

After viewing the article “Project based Learning,” //I totally agree that projects that have depth, duration, and complexity will challenge students and motivate them towards construction of knowledge. They will acquire problem-solving, communication, collaboration, planning, and self- evaluation skills//, however due to the fact that our academic content standards are too numerous, I don’t see this happening in our public schools in the near future. I can not imagine me having the time to allow one hundred of my students time to gather information, go on field trips, formulate a hypothesis, and test it for even one of the standards that I must cover plus manage to get everything else covered.

I marvel at the fact that this magnet school hoping to lure students to pursue careers in science can provide each of their students with a laptop computer. As our team struggles to manage to get our students acclimated to a project using “Wordle,” we had several students loose their work because the computer shut down twice and they had to start all over again. We barely have enough that work properly for the whole class to use. I must wonder if we will ever have equity in the classroom. I believe those responsible for “No Child Left Behind have done a tremendous disservice to our students. Everyone that I know who teaches has nothing good to say about this idea. While we put everything aside to teach to the test, our students are losing the ability to think. For example, my 8th grade social studies students are experts in how to use a math calculator, but when I mark their papers with a score of 6/10, they ask me if that is a good grade. For a while I thought they were kidding, but they have no clue that that is a “D.” When I asked them how they would solve this in Math class, they said, “Hit the percent key on the calculator.” We no longer have time to teach common sense because we are so busy covering the content standards which don’t prepare them for the real world. I totally believe that the ideas presented here would be the best way to teach, but in reality most likely won’t happen. I certainly have hope, but I am a realist.