Month: October 2020

From my K-12 schooling I do not remember a lot of citizenship education that was not a personally responsible citizen. I was taught to be kind, help others, give what you can, and do not argue/ fight. And then I remember being told to vote because that is a big deal. How am I supposed to vote when I do not stand for much or all the ideas that are in my head are someone else’. Because for my whole life I was taught that we must listen to what other people who are smarter than you have to say. I was never really encouraged to make my own discission I was always just told what was right and what was not so excepted. I think that this falls into personally responsible citizen because I was told to do the right thing to help fix but I was never encouraged to fix the problem myself.

In my opinion because of the way that personality responsible citizens were encouraged in my school we get a lot of people that do not what to make decisions for themselves. You think about the drop in numbers of people that vote but I would argue that volunteer hours have gone up. Why is it that we think our little bit of time is so important but that our little vote does not? It does not make sense to me why we grow up in schools always being told what to do and then when we grow up and have to make our own decisions and we ask our friends, or family, or google people get upset. In the article it says how conceptions of “good citizenship” imply conceptions of the good society. The curriculum teaches us to be a good member of society and not to do great things or make change.

The way that our system is set up to produce personally responsible citizens is a broken system that needs to be fixed. In the podcast he talks about how if we want to move forward then we have to go back. I agree that the issues with our citizens today is that they did not get a good education when they were young. That taught them how to question things and how to debate and take change into their own hands. Everyone I think agrees that we want to have Justice-Orientated citizens its just the issue of how do we get there.  

It is hard to see the truth in curriculum and what it really should be because of the way that curriculum is now. It is hard to write a curriculum for a group of people that are so different and diverse. How do we please everyone in a curriculum that is so rigid? It is also difficult for teachers because they have very limited time and resources to teach everything that everyone would want to be taught in schools. To have curriculum as part of a large public debate it is hard to draw a line between what gets brought into the classroom and what should stay out of curriculum. With this I think that teachers should have the option to teach things that are important to the people in that area instead of having the government dictate what should be taught because every school and even classroom is different and have different needs.

Curriculum is complicated is an understatement. Curriculum is a very generalized term that has to encompass so many things in one word. Curriculum is the lessons that are taught each day, the overall goals of the year, and key topics that are to be discussed, the lessons that students are to learn, etc. To have a curriculum that teachers are expected to follow is almost pointless because every teacher is going to follow the curriculum differently and going to teach different topics and ask different questions and the students are going to learn differently. Curriculum and teachers in my opinion have a hard relationship. Teachers are instructed to follow a curriculum but then they are forced to adapt in every situation. And it causes a tough balance between teacher and curriculum.

Teachers can begin at addressing the ways in which our school systems can be more open to homosexual, trans, bisexual, and queer people are by not segregating. In my opinion, the most oppressive thing for any marginalized group is to be segregated. In many situations throughout the day in schools, there are segregated moments that can be avoided if the teacher is able to distinguish them. The main one would be gendered bathrooms. The issue with this is that by having a separate bathroom for homosexual, trans, bisexual, and queer people that segregates but by having individual bathrooms that everyone goes to then there is no chance for children to feel like they are different. Another time is in gym class when teachers often separate kids into groups based on gender. This is not ideal because the teacher will then make assumptions about children’s gender that could be very harmful. The last one that I think is very important is just about the books that we have on our bookshelves. By having books that are based on not just boy-girl couples or boys play football and girls wearing pink we are able to change the way that students will think about the world around them. And will not have problems because they are a boy and they do not like football or a girl who does not like pink.

To me integrating queerness into the school’s curriculum is by being me. I am majoring in math and minoring in physics and I think this is a huge queerness that is not often seen in many schools. Growing up I had two women math teachers and no women physics teachers. By being a math and physics teacher and being a woman, I can queer the gender norm of always having male math and science teachers. I will be able to show young women that they are so smart and able to excel in maths and sciences.

With my understanding, I believe that teachers should be the provider of care for all students. As teachers, it is not our job to push our own agenda. We are there to help the students learn and to grow and become whole humans. We must respect and care for all students as well as support them in any way that we may see fit.

A good student is according to commonsense is a student that does as they are told, gets good grades, and leaves with more knowledge then when they came in. The student does as they are told in all situations. Is quite when they are supposed to, engages in discussion when prompted, goes to the bathroom at appropriate times, listened to directions perfectly, and overall does everything that the teacher asks of them. In the article “Preparing Teachers for Crisis: A Sample Lesson” the teacher discusses what it means to learn. I the diagram it illustrates that student come into the class empty and a good student would leave full, or not at the same level. This is the commonsense that most people would expect out of school and how the student might learn.

The students that are privileged in this definition of commonsense are the students that the best is reflected in a good grade. In lots of cases the student’s grades does not reflect their knowledge or how smart they are. Some students do not do well with written exams and would be better with an oral exam or a project. In other cases, some students are very smart in social skills, art, drama, finance however they are not good at English, math, and science so they are said to be not smart because they will get lower grades. Students that learn well in a structured environment that has a rigid schedule. I for example love schedules and I thrive on structure. I am not good with changes in plans and I find it hard to focus when I have more then one task put in front of me. However, there are many students who if given all the assignments at one time to accomplish would do amazing because they could create their own schedule. Students that do not have their own opinion. I think that in most schools that want students would repeat what was taught to them. If a student already has an opinion on a topic it will be harder for them to change and agree with what the teacher has taught.

The context behind all these students in that historically the government want students that were easy to mold into what they wanted. Historically education was to prep people for the workforce, so cooperativeness, high grades, and good listening are very important to have in the workplace. Other than that the government did not want people to branch off and do their own thing so they have a very rigid curriculum and schedules that students were to follow so that when they got to the workforce it was commonsense to work from 9-5 and only have a few lunch breaks and to do what your boss told you to do.