Building a Staircase

The students reach the top when they understand what has been taught to them.

The students build off of what they have learned to gain a better understanding of the subject.

The students need a good base knowledge so that they will be able to have the basic understanding of a subject.


Once the teacher knows what type of students they have the plan for teaching the subject will be able to be worked out.

Building a stair case is like teaching. You first have to start by getting all the materials and make a plan on how to build the stair case. Like teaching you need to start by finding out who your students are and the best way that they learn, so that you can most efficiently teach them. Once you know what materials you have and a plan at how to construct the stairs you start by building a foundation that will be sturdy enough to hold up the stairs. As a teacher you need to provide a base knowledge that the students can build off of. You build the staircase one stair at a time off of each other. As a teacher once the base knowledge is learned you start to teach off of that. The main goal of the stairs is to reach the top. As a teacher you teach the children in increasing order until they reach the main goal of knowing the material that you are teaching in depth. So it all starts with learning who your students are, giving them a basic knowledge of what they are learning, and going in depth so that they learn the material that is being taught. You would not want to build your stairs on a foundation that is not sturdy because they will fall over. Just like teaching you can not teach someone effectively if they do not have a basic understanding before you get into the more detailed material.

I chose building a staircase to compare to teaching because there are so many different ways and materials a staircase can be built but in the end each staircase’s purpose is to bring you to a different level. Like teaching there are so many different kinds of students with different learning styles but each student’s goal is to gain better understanding of a subject matter.

Using Race to decide what students go to what school

I chose to do my blog on race in school. I first started by looking for cases where race was a problem in the classroom but ended up finding a case a little bit different. I found a case where the community decided that the families can send their children to any school in a given district. At first thought I thought this was a good idea but once I kept reading it turned out that the problem was too many families wanted to send their children to the same schools. The school had to decide what students to take and what ones had to find a different school in the district to go to.

The problem was that with so many families wanting to go to the same school the school needed to let some students leave. When deciding on what students they should take in the school race became an aspect of who stays and who goes. The schools say that they wanted to have students of all different races in the schools and that’s why they chose the way that they did. Many families feel that it was not a fair way of deciding because kids were having to go to schools that were no where near their homes. A group of parents got together to sue the school district saying that it didn’t make sense the way that the children were being chosen. The school did not get sued because the students were not being kicked out of the school district just the specific school. I think that it is good to have a school with a mix of students with different backgrounds but I also think that students should go to the schools that are close to their homes for convenience.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/06/05/scotus.schools.race/index.html

Vocational-Technical Schools

I picked Vocational-Technical Schools because I think that they are valuable to have for high school students. It provides students who want to learn a trade a better opportunity to learn it. If the student goes to a public school they will take a lot of classes that do not interest them and possibly have the student not want to go to school anymore.

I learned that vocational schools offer more programs then I thought that they would. The school provides numerous job training classes for students who are interested in a certain trade. Some that surprised me the most was dental assistant, criminal justice, surgical technician, and medical assistant. I originally thought that it was mostly a school for, auto repair, piping, food preparation, and other jobs of that nature.

I think that this type of school is a good opportunity for students to pursue a career. It gives them many options of different trades that they may be interested in. It can help out students who struggle in public schools not because they are not intelligent but because they are not interested in what is being taught. I like in the book in the paragraph that starts “slackers need not apply” (197) because it shows that the school is not looking for students who are trying to take the easy rout to get out of public schools.

http://www.hightechinstitute.edu/career/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=ppc&utm_term=vocational+schools&utm_campaign=HTI+-+Corporate+/+Identity

John Dewey

I agree with the philosopher John Dewey, I liked his views on how people think and the idea of finding the truth. His main philosophies are that people thought becomes fact. As he stated “the world of fact does not stand apart from thought, but is itself defined within thought as its objective manifestation.” He is showing that in order for something to become a fact it has to start off as a thought. I have heard this theory before a couple times, one place I heard this idea was in the movie James and the Giant Peach when they land in New York and James is saying in order for everything to be created it had to be dreamt first. This is slightly different then the ideas of John Dewey but is along the idea that people have to think of something before it can be a fact.

Dewey’s second point is finding the truth; He argues that the truth is found when it agrees with reality. He states “the traditional correspondence theory of truth, according to which the true idea is one that agrees or corresponds to reality, only begs the question of what the "agreement" or "correspondence" of idea with reality is.” He is saying that truth is only something that we believe because it fits in with reality. Something could not be true but because it corresponds with reality we believe it to be true. He also talks about how something is only true if it is successfully employed in the pursuit of human goals.

I agree with Dewey because he uses good points about the truth and how we know if something is really true or just believed to be true. I have talked about this idea of is there anything that is really true in a class I have taken. There are people who come up with different reasons why something is not true and it is interesting to think about, so I enjoyed reading about John Dewey.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/dewey.htm