ED 430 Curriculum and Instruction Spring 2019

I apologize for the late blog. Life comes at you fast! Week 13 discusses the negative and positive connotations connected to grades and how we evaluate students' performance. I can see the perspective of grades having little to no value true value because they push learners to be motivated by grades rather than the "joy of learning." It is true that we as educators need to do a better job at pushing the learning process to be a joyous one and one that is much more than just a letter grade. So often, we get caught up in the mandates that we have to meet. Unfortunately, I can't show up to my Principal's office with no grades entered and say "the kids learned a lot." I personally that the system was more so built like that because I think it would help create a generation of thinks, inquirers, innovators, etc. I think that accountability and follow through are important but genuine learning experiences are more valuable in my eyes. I have even told studen

Over the course of this semester, I have really enjoyed my time in ED 430. One of this things I respected and appreciated the most was the people that showed up and shared their opinions with all of us. I love hearing different perspectives and thoughts on the different topics that we learned about. I think one of the lessons that sticks out the most to me was when we looked at different education quotes and had to pick our favorite.  I surprised myself with what quotes I agreed and disagreed with. I also loved seeing what quotes everyone else shared as their favorites. Another memorable day was when we had the student board come in and talk about stresses of high school life and curriculum. This really helped me reflect on my own teaching because I got to see school through the eyes of students. It has been a long time since I was in high school, and things have definitely changed. Hearing the thoughts of kids currently in the education system made me thing about my own students.

So, I totally spaced on when I was supposed to blog, not even thinking to look until it was already a week too late. So apologies for this being about something we already talked about in class, two weeks ago now. But I feel like it can be informed by what we talked about in class! To recap, I felt it was instructive to think about federal spending on education as a fight between the 10 th and 14 th amendments , with the 10 th saying that all of the powers not explicitly granted in the Constitution go to the states, and the 14 th saying that all people must receive equal treatment under the law. For a long time, the 10 th amendment won out, and the federal government had basically no role in education policy. Then in the 1960s, the Supreme Court set down the Brown v. Board of Education decision using the 14 th amendment to declare that schools could no longer be segregated based on race because when students were separated, they were not treated equally. This spurred the

Week 14 Reflection I have two big takeaways from this course, which are really ideas I’ve had for some time that were reinforced by the activities and readings we’ve done: First, there is so much that goes into every lesson that teachers teach. We did the activity where we thought of all of the environmental factors that might go into what a child was thinking as a teacher was teaching, most of which are out of the teacher’s control. But many of those factors the teacher does think about, like the pacing of the lessons, making activities varied and interesting, setting the culture of the classroom,   deciding what to focus on in the first place, deciding how to hold students accountable for what they are supposed to have learned. I appreciated the resources and ideas for varying lessons and writing meaningful goals and objectives. There are so many decisions that teachers have to make, which, of course, having taught in high schools for over a decade, I already knew. But I fe

Apple’s article presents the effects that the disastrous event 9/11 had on schools. He analyses the social and pedagogic context of the 9/11 tragedy. In the article, Apple uses “compulsory patriotism” to describe the damaging effects the event 9/11 caused in schools. He assumes that 9/11 had effects on pedagogy, which pushed schools to participate in a complicated set of patriotic discourses and practices. However, he thinks that the patriotic fervor that arose with the supports of the government and the public after 9/11 was radical and also a threat to real freedom, at least in the field of education. I was shocked when I read that a lot of extreme and radical revenges on some Islamic, Punjabi, Sikh and other students occurred in high schools and at universities after 9/11. How could this happen? Was it just because of patriotism and anger stimulated by the tragedy? Why did students who receive education have those extreme behaviors? I think this irrational reveng

Apple’s article talked about pedagogy, patriotism and democracy by using the example of 11 September 2001. The author said that it is important to place what happened in the wake of 11 September in a context of the ‘American’ psyche and of dominant American understandings of the roles the United States plays in the world. And the author mentioned some teachers ignored the horror by simply resorting to normality as a defence against paralysis. In other classes, days were spent tin discussion of the events. Sadness, disbelief and shock were registered.  When I read about this, I was wondering what kind of class I will choose to have if I were one of the teachers. I think I probably would choose the latter one. I want to lead the class to talk about the events, let the students sharing their feelings about it. I agree with the author that pedagogical work needed to be done. But it wasn’t a simple issue. On the one hand, pedagogical can brings people together and unity for a country.