Culture

[This post is late]

I still have some thoughts in my head about our talks regarding culture this week. Culture seems to me to be a bit of a catfish to define, it's big and wriggly and hard to get a handle on. I still have some skepticism as to whether it means anything. but as I see it there are two main understandings of what culture means. The first is the one that most of the people in the cohort were operating under, that which separates one's family from everybody else's family. Another is culture as meaning a large group of people with a shared history. For example, I see myself as part of a few of these cultures, American, Scots-Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Northern European, and on a larger level, Western. These are my people, and their history is the story of the honored dead, my ancestors, which is how I understand myself as being in these cultures. Perhaps this is not the sort of understanding of culture that was expected for the self documentation assignment, but I think it may be useful to think a little more about this type of culture. It may be less immediate than the first understanding, but that may actually be a reason why it is so important to study. I think when we go to teach about culture, we consider both terms and clarify our terms when we are teaching remembering that the less clarified a term is, the less useful it is.

Another thought I had about culture came from the cultural standard listed in the lesson about animal classification in the Yu'pik region. It read, "Live a life in accordance with the cultural values and traditions of the local community and integrate them into their everyday behavior." In all honesty, I don't think that this standard has any place in an American public school and I have a couple of reasons.

1. It is not at all assessable. In fact it does not have just one unassessable learning target, it has four. First, living in accordance to a cultural value. Second, living in accordance to a cultural tradition. Third, integrating a cultural value into everyday behavior. Fourth, integrating a cultural tradition into everyday behavior. A teacher cannot assess any of these reliably at school, which makes the standard useless at best.

2. I think that this assessment is more than useless though, I think that it has some serious moral problems with it. Where is it the schools, and by extension, the government's business to instruct a child to be just like everybody around them, to believe and value the same things? This is akin to saying to a child, "act like a white christian apostate, since all the people around you are white christian apostates." I want to be careful to draw a distinction between this brand of government sponsored relativism and teaching American virtues such as freedom, respect for private property, and tolerance. This standard says to act a certain way since it is how the people around you act, rather one should teach a child to act a certain way because those ways of being are based on morals that transcend time and space. For example, a child should not follow the golden rule, do unto others as you would be done by, because it is what is popular, it is all too often not. They should live by it because it is right.

Culture is a great tool that humanity has developed, and we have learned many tools by it. We must be careful though to mot place it on too high a pedestal, lest the tool become a foreman to hard for out freedom and our reason to bear.

Work, Progress, and Hope.

This week in class we have had many a talk about setting goals and working towards them. In my weeks that I am in my placement I lead the morning meetings, and this week the theme was doing things that are hard and working until you achieve your goals. This is something of a problem with my group, many of them have quite explicitly told me that they do not like work and would rather give up than try something hard. This includes both academic work, and the work of improving ones behavior. I think that this is perhaps one of the most important lessons we can teach the children, that one can change their behavior and can accomplish their goals if they are to work hard, and very little of value come without hard work. I sometimes feel as though these types of lessons I try to teach them fall upon deaf ears, in the more cynical moments that I am wont to have I wonder if the students can ever really change or improve at all.

In these moments I am confronted by the reality of progress though, and in this week two cases were most noticeable. One is a boy whom I will call L. L has been something of a trouble maker this year, and has not been performing well in school. He is easily distracted, and he has admitted himself that he lets his feelings get the better of him, especially when he is around his friends. Last week though, my CT and I decided one thing we can do to support him was to move him front and center in the class, where we can keep an eye on him. We decided to do this because I got a gut feeling that L is a very naturally curious child, who really loves to learn but is distracted by his friends and the quest for their approval. I think I was right, because this last week, he was on fire, he was full of questions, and full of answers, not all of which were correct, but they were genuine. He has also started self monitoring, on one of his homework sheets he wrote, "I need to check whether I am distracted more often so that I can learn." When we had the students in the class set a behavior goal and a way to achieve that goal his goal was to not let others distract him so much, his solution was to, "ignore [his] senses." Quite zen for a nine year old I think. I am incredibly proud of the boy and I am excited to see what happens next for him.

The other case is more subtle, and has been fraught with more frustration than the last. I will call the girl S, she has a difficult life. As I understand it, she almost never sees her family, and they are not the most well balanced of sorts. She herself is the lowest performing student in the class, and frequently needs to be re-taught the most basic of concepts, like addition. Part of this is that she refuses to do anything hard, or that she has not done before, and if she decides she does not want to do something, she will fight tooth and nail. In one instance, my CT asked her to stay in from recess and do her home work, she even made a compromise, do two review problems and then she can go. S yelled and screamed and started throwing items in her desk before she would do it. Then she fumed for fifteen minutes until she finally did them. I could go on with incidents like this, but it would be indecorous. On Friday I was ready to give up on her, I really was. Then I talked to one of the special ed teachers at the school who knows S quite well, and considers S to be quite dear. According to her, this year has been a time of monumental growth for the girl in her own way. We did not have long to talk, but it was enough to get me thinking. S will have a hard time in school, but she is better now than she was, and she has those who love her.

I am left this week considering the virtue of hope. Hope can be hard, otherwise it would not be a virtue. The future of my class can go any number of ways, but I will hold onto the thought that a good one is attainable. It will be hard, and I will fail often and spectacularly, But I am thankful for this too, and I hope to, with ample help, communicate this to my students. To rejoice in difficulty, and even the suffering of failure, for this produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.

tl;dr: Hope=Failure+Time

Smartboards

This week in class I got to learn about smart boards, they are really nifty. My main placement class does not have one, which is too bad. One of my dyad classes had one, and the teacher was able to use it to some good effect in his class. I first thought that smart boards may not be a good use of money or whiteboard space, and I wasn't sure what they do that a whiteboard does not. I learned about some really nice features they provide to the discerning user, such as the ability to layer items, or to write on what is on the screen. Also there is a feature to add equations into the boards quickly and easily, which is nice. I have over time learned to appreciate technology in the classroom more, items like tablets, chromebooks, and Smart Boards are good supplements for the skilled teacher in our industrialized and developed economy.

Seating Chart

One interesting thing that I did this week was help make a seating chart for the month of February, it was a real concrete way to express my knowledge of the students and their relationships with one another, and where to seat them to fill their needs. For example, there is one boy, I will call him L, who I know is a really curious boy and likes to learn things and participate in class, but he is easily distracted so I put him front and center right by the teachers desk. I also know that he has two boys he spends a lot of time with, and they often distract each other, so I put each of them on the opposite sides of the room. Since I have not been teaching a whole lot, I have had more time to spy on the students and learn about them than my CT has, so I know a whole slough of details about their lives. I also usually sit in the back of the room so I can see what they do behind their desks where they think no one can see them. They are wrong. I see everything. Making a seating chart was a good opportunity to take what I know of the students, and what I know from class and apply it to the very shape of the room. I sure hope that it turns out well.