On October 30th, instead of meeting in our normal classroom we went to Kearney Hall to see a presentation on Frankenstein.  The talk was given by a professor from the University of Rochester and it was concerning congenital mal-deformations.  I thought that her talk was a little dull because of the way that she presented.  Instead of introducing the interesting parts of her speech in the beginning of her talk, she waited until the end.  That left me wondering for most of the speech how it really related to the novel of Frankenstein.  I thought that the case studies were interesting because they came with pictures and stories instead of just medical history and theory.  All in all, I thought that this was a good change-up from the usual class meeting and I generally enjoyed it.

I thought that this article was very interesting.  It talks about the practice of taking college classes online instead of actually in a classroom.  It says that the number of people who are taking at least one online class has greatly increased over the last few years.  Even though participation in these classes have increased, it seems that only community colleges and some big public universities are offering online degree programs.  I think that this is because small private colleges, like Fisher, offer “an experience” as part of their education as well as the actual knowledge.  I don’t know if I agree with being able to just get a degree without ever stepping on campus.  I don’t think that the classes are the same, especially in the higher level classes where discussion is such a huge part of the class.

This article fits into what we are learning in class because if this trend continues, all of the classroom management and literacy strategies that we are learning in class right now would be non-existent.  I feel this way because I do not think it is possible to get the practice and interaction that we have in our education classes, online.  Online classes are alright for like 100 level classes, but after that I think that you should have to actually be in a classroom to get a degree.

    I found this article in the New York Times to be very encouraging.  It talks about the survey just conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  This survey is administered every six years and collects data from school districts around the country.  This article talked about the improvements by schools around the country in the area of student health.  The percentages of junk food, smoking allowed on campuses and French fries at schools have decreased.  Also, the percentage of schools requiring physical education has increased.

I believe that these findings are a good sign that American schools are on the right track to becoming less obese.  I think that decreasing junk food snacks and meals like French fries and substituting healthy choices are good strategies to help continue this decrease in unhealthy eating habits.  Also, I believe that the percentage of smoking that is allowed on school grounds should be zero.  I do not think that smoking should ever be warranted on school grounds because it is harmful to students and also it sets a poor example for them.  This is because students look up to adults, especially teachers, and to see them practicing a habit that is so harmful, students will think that it is alright to smoke.  I thought that this article was pretty good because it highlighted the steps that are being made to improve the health of American children.

    I thought that this article was very interesting.  It touched on a subject that I believe to be very important in education, which is trying to increase the number of students taking AP exams.  The City of New York is having $1 million donated from philanthropists to “reward” students who do well on AP exams.  This program is still very new and is only going to cover a small number of schools in the city district.

I am not really sure how I feel about the methods that are being applied in this situation.  I agree with the idea of trying to increase student participation in AP exams, but I don’t know if I certainly agree with the method of paying students to do well.  My problem is that I think that I can be pretty sure when I say that it will only be implemented in New York City and not the rest of the state.  I think that programs like this should be implemented in cities throughout the whole state because this problem is not unique to just New York City.

This article touches on the issue of equity that we made out vocab tree out of.  It is showing how there is inequalities between the percentage of AP exams that are being taken in New York City compared to the rest of the state.  I liked the article and I hope that this method achieves its goal of increasing the percentage of AP exams being taken.

I picked this article from the New York Times because I thought that it was interesting.  The article talks about how there is a misconception that state lotteries are big funders of public education.  The article said that most people think that state lotteries account for a pretty large portion of public school funds.  I also believed this too.  But, the article says that New York has the greatest percentage of its lottery proceeds going to education and it is only about five percent.  That means that even though almost everyone who is buying a lottery ticket believes that their money is going towards public schools, only five percent is and 95 percent of it is going elsewhere.  Another issue that the article addressed was the fact that many states are continually decreasing the allotment of money going towards education from their lottery sales.  Also, a problem is that states are using that money as a plug-in so that they can divert some money that was going to be going to public schools elsewhere.  I believe that a greater percentage of lottery sales should go towards funding public schools.  Other than paying out to the winners, the funds generated should go towards schooling.

This article can link to the podcast that we were suppose to listen to in that both sides of the argument about state testing talked about needing more funds.  I believe that if more lottery funds were distributed to public schools, maybe some of the problems that the speakers highlighted would be solved.  One way would be that there could be smaller class sizes, which would promote learning because teachers could connect better with their students like one of the speaker’s teachers “Francesca” did.

This is a very interesting article from the New York Times.  I find enjoyed it because it made me think about what I feel is morally right.  I also liked it because sometimes it is refreshing to see that the government is not always portrayed as “the greatest thing since sliced bread.”  In this article, the people at Yale’s School of Law do not want representatives from the armed forces to attend their job fairs.  Their reason for this is because of the armed forces’ stance of don’t ask, don’t tell in regards to sexual orientation.  The people at Yale see this stance as discriminating to gay, lesbian and bisexual students who might be attending the job fair.  Even though their argument was shot down by the courts, in that the federal government would withhold approximately $300million in funds for the entire school, I believe that it was successful in that it brought attention to the issue of the armed forces discrimination of sexual deviants.  This article links into what we are learning in our Social Studies methods course.  We have gone over how part of the goal Social Studies is to teach active citizenship.  Part of being an active citizen is to legally stand up for what you believe is right, which the people of Yale School of Law did by going to court and pleading their case.  I enjoyed this article because it showed people participating in government to try and make a statement about something they saw as unjust.

For this blog, I selected an article from the New York Times online web page.  I thought that this article was interesting in that it showed how society’s views on science education have changed throughout relatively recent history.  The article started out talking about the effect the launch of the Soviet satellite, Sputnik, had on the American education system.  Math and Science suddenly were important because as Americans, we needed to beat the Soviets in everything, especially the space race.

The article then proceeded to talk about how times have changed in regards to emphasis and teaching techniques of science.  Science educators claim that current testing standards have a negative effect on the way science is taught, with an emphasis on regurgitating  information instead of experimenting and researching.  I find that this article coincides with what I am learning in my methods class, even though it is in a different subject.  The same problems associated with No Child Left Behind and teaching Social Studies are affecting the American science curriculum.  In addition, science educators say curriculum structure is old and outdated just like how the social studies curriculum has not really been changed since the early 1900s.

The article that I chose to blog about was from the New York Times and was titled:  Alabama Plan Brings Out Cry for Resegregation.  I thought that this article was quite disturbing, in that it showed that problems of segregation in schools are still occurring in the year 2007.  The Alabama city of Tuscaloosa is facing a problem in that it has three different school zones.  Two of the zones are predominantly black and the third is still mostly black, but has a much higher percentage of white students.  In addition to having more white students, the third zone is rated as high performing, while the other two are rated as low performing.  The problem occurred when complaints of overcrowding in the third zone caused the school board to rezone students away.  Pretty much all of the students who were rezoned are black, which led their parents to complain to the school board was “resegregating” the black students away from the white students in the higher performing zone.

This article connects with what I learned in Survey of Education.  In that class, we learned about the history of American education from colonial times to modern day.  We covered how the strides made in educational equality were the precursors of the civil rights movement.  When I read this article, I was thinking about our lessons on the topic of civil rights and the accomplishments of the movement.  I find it ironic that in 2007, we are fighting the same problems that we thought were “fixed” in the 1950s through the 1970s.

For my article, I read Starting Fast, With an Eye on the Long Run, from the September 10th edition of the New York Times. This article talked about the new mayor of Washington D.C., Adrian M. Fenty, and his views and aspirations for his term. The part of the article that I focused on was his view on the public school system. He talks about how he wants to improve the system of supplying the schools. There are boxes of school supplies that are sitting in a basement waiting to be delivered, but they can not because of lost order sheets and other problems. Mr. Fenty wants to fix all of this because it is the first part of his plan to improve schooling. Once schools have adequate resources, then teachers can be held accountable for their students’ learning and also, as Mr. Fenty believes, testing results will improve. I believe that Mr. Fenty is going about improving his schools the right way because students need to have proper materials in order to achieve high standards. To connect this article to our reading, in Subjects Matter, the authors talk about how just reading a novel does not help students learn to their best ability.  They need to build upon their previous knowledge with the help of the teacher.

Hey, this is my first blog post ever and I hope it works.  I guess I will see everyone in class tomorrow.