How I Would Change the K12 Curriculum. *VERY* Rough Draft.

I was in the American education system for 75% of my life. In those years, I learned to recognize the benefits, and the costs, of the mass American system that is the K-12 curriculum. Now, while I can't speak for every student, or school, or educator that is part of this system, I can speak from my own point-of-view and the point-of-view of my peers. The point of this argument is clear, teacher's need to learn how to develop motivation and passion along with the curriculum, or students will never truly learn what they are "taught".
I am speaking to the educators, not just of America but of the world, when I say that most kids do not enjoy learning, nor do they want too. It is not the kid's fault. The problem with mass education in America is that everyone is taught the same subject, every day, every year, and these kid's are just getting information overload shoved down their throats and are then expected to regurgitate it back out perfectly on a test. It doesn't take a Harvard graduate with a Ph.D. in education to see that this simply does not work.
Why not? Why can't you teach every student the same thing and get perfect results back from everyone, equally? Well, for starters, not everyone is the same. We all have different personalities, different lives, different families, homes, stories, and we all learn differently too. Yes, it is true that it is near impossible to teach every student in this country individually the best way they can. However, it is possible to boost the student's motivation, so that they not only enjoy learning, they want to learn, and they love it.
We see this effect in Finland, a country with the highest test scores and rates of graduation. You could call Finland the Holy Grail of primary and secondary education. While American students test 14th in reading, 17th in science, and 25th in math, Finland is at the top on almost all accounts. How is this possible? What is Finland doing that we're not? In Finland, the amount of homework given is slim to none, there is no mandated testing, and their teachers are only trained at the most elite universities, and only hired if they are in the top 20%, sometimes 10% of their class. This creates an almost perfect environment for the students to truly prosper in their subjects. With much lower stress, the students don't dread to wake up early on weekdays and drag themselves out of bed. With outstanding teachers who truly know their subjects and how to teach, the student learns to extremely respect what the teacher's are telling them, they choose to listen and retain the information, and therefore learn more than the average American. Investigative reporter Amanda Ripley called this system in an interview on CNN the "utopian model".
If we adopted an education system similar to Finland's, we would see an increase in test scores, a decrease in drop outs, and a major increase in the student's positive attitude and happiness. The secret lies in the ability for the curriculum to develop a passion for each student, and let them grow from it. This will teach every child to grow to their full potential.

Writing Strategies

       Other the years, I have used many different writings strategies. Usually, when assigned a essay, I start by writing an outline. My outline first consists of my thesis statement, along with a topic sentence for each paragraph that I plan to incorporate into my essay. Next, I go back and add at least 3 details and supporting claims to my thesis and to the topic sentences. Then, I add conclusion sentences to wrap them all up. My next step is to copy the outline onto a new document, and type the essay along the same lines. I do not usually write it word for word with my outline, and I often add extra sentences to make it more interesting. If my paper is educational and includes sources, this is when I usually go back and add in the citations while rereading to edit and revise. I will proofread one more time to make sure it sounds good, and to make sure it all ties back to the thesis and the topic I was assigned.
       Another writing strategy I use is to just flow straight out of my mind and onto the paper. While this technique is often sloppy for educational texts, I find it to be the best strategy for narratives and story-telling pieces. Now, I don't just type it and turn it in. I will usually type out the entire essay in one swift motion, not taking any breaks, just getting every idea down. Next, I go back and edit and revise. Then, I edit and revise again, and again, and again. I repeat that process until the paper sounds professional yet still personal. Though this strategy is the most effective one for me, though I would not recommend it to those who are writing an informative or persuasive paper.

Argument on Mud Wrestling

Thesis:
Cartoonists do not value mud wrestling, but they should because mud wrestling actually increases their chances of becoming successful cartoonists.

Topic sentences:
1. Mud wrestling will increase their adrenaline and in turn their creativity.
2. Mud wrestling relieves stress from a long day of cartooning.
3. Mud wrestling is comical which can inspire them to create funnier cartoons.
4. Mud wrestling will increase their popularity as a cartoonists.

The Most Important Change.

The most important change in our education system is mindfulness. It is extremely important to build a level of mindfulness for the students in order to teach then to think and learn for themselves. "It teaches them kindness, caring, empathy, and being able to decenter from their own point-of-view and listen deeply to others." This sets up the students to be better communicators with other people and increases their chances of success in whatever they choose. With increased mindfulness, there is increased passion and creativity and therefore increased success.

Connections between Chalk and other texts

Freire's concern with the modern education's style of teaching or the, "banking concept of education", involves a teacher narrating information to the students, for them to memorize in a mechanical behavior. The movie Chalk shows an example of Freire's concern when the first time history teacher is narrating to his students what history is, and demands that they memorize his interpretation of it.

Gatto's concern with modern high school was if high school had any relevance with educating it's students that attend. In Gatto's essay he asks the readers, "do we really need school", and then explains to readers how a, "considerable number of well-known Americans never went through a twelve year wringer our kids currently go through, and how high school is destroying the creativity of the children. Chalk portrays Gatto's concerns of the relevance of high school by creating a scene where a three year history teacher talks to one of his students after class, and scorns him that he shouldn't of been dancing, and should of been doing his history homework.

Rose's concern involves his belief that modern high schools should be focusing on making the young people become more engaged with education, rather then having teachers narrating to students in a mechanical matter. Chalk positively portrays Rose's concern by recording how a three year history teacher focuses on asking his students to be constantly engaged in his lessons, and how he constantly helped students struggling, because he believed that if his students failed, then he failed.

Black's concern involves how modern high schools are allowing anyone to work as a teacher, because they wanted to, 'help', without the basic qualifications that come along with becoming a qualified teacher. Chalk clearly emphasizes this point by following a first time history teacher who was previously was a computer maintenance technician, who wanted to, 'help', at the high school. Students quickly catch onto the fact that he is unqualified, and a first time teacher, and instantly begin disrespecting his authority.

Thoughts on Chalk

Chalk illustrates the difficulties that teacher's are faced with in today's education system. It displays the issue of motivating kids to want to learn, and the issue of motivating teachers to want to teach. The problem of disrespect between the students and teachers is repeated many times throughout Chalk, and it shows its overall negative affects. When the student doesn't respect the teacher, he won't listen to what the teacher is saying, and if the teacher doesn't respect the student than he doesn't care.

Notes from Chalk

• ·         Teachers always talking about the students and the faculty and teaching
• ·         But they never quit because they loved teaching
• ·         50% of teachers quit within the first 3 years of teaching
• ·         It’s the first day of school
• ·         Kids look exhausted already
• ·         Teachers immediately start giving out rules
• ·         Teachers trying too hard to get kids involved, just making it worse
• ·         Teachers are having a hard time
• ·         Some teachers get involved with their students
• ·         Some teachers obviously have no idea what they’re doing
• ·         Teachers are being taught how to teach… as they’re teaching
• ·         Students are fighting, the teachers have to break it up
• ·         1^st year history teacher is having major problems getting control
• ·         The AP is becoming really stressed
• ·         The teachers have terrible communication
• ·         Everyone is having trouble connecting
• ·         1^st year history teacher is starting to learn how to get his class more interested
• ·         The teachers are slacking off almost as much as the students, sometimes more
• ·         The teachers and the students don’t respect each other
• ·         Lindsay is getting very upset and stressed
• ·         He didn’t win teacher of the year even though he tried so hard
• ·         The AP is figuring out that she’s a better teacher than AP
• ·         1^st year history teacher wins the spelling hornet
• ·         Mr. Lowry finally connected with the students and is enjoying his job as a teacher
• ·         Mr. Lowry hasn’t decided if he wants to stay as a teacher or not
• ·         In the end, the teachers learned just as much as the students

Our Education System

What we believe the purpose of K-12 education should be:

1) To help children prosper and grow
2)To make each person his/her personal best

Why?:   Because this will help our species prosper and advance in a healthy way


5 quotes from the text supporting that what we claim is the purpose of education and what the "true purpose" is, are two very different things:
          1. "The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best."
          2. "These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them."
         3. "The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States . . . and that is its aim everywhere else. "
         4. "an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens - all in order to render the populace "manageable.""
         5. "We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. "

Teaching Comparison Final Draft

This world is full of many different teaching styles, from the free-flowing agenda of the French education system to the strict rules of Iran and Afghanistan. We all have also been exposed to different personal teaching styles from our teachers growing up. When I was in high school, I was definitely not closed off from these styles as I was exposed to the good, the bad, and the outright ugly. Nowhere could you find both sides of the teaching spectrum as you did in the North Kitsap High School math program. There, we find two teachers of the same subject but of completely different teaching styles, Mr. Olson and Mr. D.

                In my freshman year at NKHS, I had a teacher by the name of... Let's just call him Mr. D. Mr. D was a short, chubby, awkward man, and I could tell the second I walked in that he wasn't meant to be standing in front of this class, he was meant to be in it. I don't think a day passed where he finished a single sentence about algebra. He would have a problem on the board, give us 10 minutes to solve it, and then he would solve it for us, not explaining how to do it, though. Most of the period was spent discussing the Huskies or his days in the navy, never actually about math. He would give us homework, but never check it or grade it. I don't think that anyone passed that class with higher than a B. However, at the end-of-the-year awards assembly, he gave me the award for best math student in his class.
                There was one instance that stood out about Mr. D. I remember that one day, we had just finished the 1st unit and everyone in the class was having enormous troubles with understanding the work. Mr. D spent the entire class time talking about the huskies game from the day before. This was back when NKHS had a block schedule, and he spent the entire 2 hour block talking about something that was completely irrelevant to the class. He discussed the final score of the game, all of the plays, even did a reenactment of one of the touchdowns. Not one minute was spent on algebra that day. The worst part, our unit test that was worth 50% of our quarter grade, was the next day.

                Being new to high school, let's just say that that wasn't necessarily the greatest way to start off my high school career. However, everything turned around the next year. In my sophomore year I took Geometry, taught by a man that as might as well have been God. Seriously, it was like being shown how to complete a proof by Morgan Freeman. His name was Mr. Olson, and he changed my view on education forever. Every day, my friend and I would walk into class and sit in our seats up at the front, and the first sentence he said would always blow your mind, such as "Pi is the meaning of life." At this point, you're thrown off, does he mean apple pie, or pi the number? And how could it be the meaning of life? He would then begin to explode your brain with endless knowledge and information in any way possible. He'd show you the math, tell you how it works, how it applies to the universe, how you can use it yourself, and by the end of the class you would walk out of that room truly believing that the meaning of life is Pi.
                I owe my high school career to Mr. Olson, because he made me want to learn again. One day you would walk in and he'd have some crazy contraption with a bunch of tubes and metal rods coming out of it and you'd have no idea what it was. He'd then go to show you how it relates to your life and mathematics and plug it in and small bolts of electricity would start dancing in between the rods. The next day he'd show you a clip from a Mel Gibson movie where he, Mel Gibson, describes a math theorem that relates to what we had been learning in class, and then Mr. Olson would go on to completely disprove everything that Mel Gibson says like it was Mystery Science Theater 3000. You would walk away actually remembering what you learned that day so when Mr. Olson handed you the unit test, you not only remembered all the material, you understood it, and loved it.

                The most important thing a teacher can do is get the student to WANT to learn. If that barrier isn't broken, it's not going to happen. Mr. D simply could not break it, but Mr. Olson shattered it into oblivion. Class with Mr. D was hell. I was literally scared that his eyebrows would jump off his face and turn out to be cockroaches and crawl all over my work! That is, if he ever leaned over my paper to look at it, which he didn't. In fact, Mr. D assigned homework every single night and only ever gave anyone credit once the entire year. Eventually the students just stopped caring, but nothing changed once they did.

                Mr. D destroyed my idea of math and education, and Mr. Olson not only rebuilt it but fortified it. Unfortunately, Mr. Olson moved to Ecuador to teach at a private school and Mr. D took over as head of the math department. In fact, when I heard that, I ran home screaming in sheer horror! Okay, it wasn't that bad, but I still can't help but feel pain for those students and disappointment in the administration.
                Mr. Olson's teaching styles wasn't complex or hard to do, he just cared about the students. He wanted to see them challenge themselves and he loved to learn. He was much like Mr. Escalante from Stand and Deliver, whereas he was willing to drop anything and help the students because he knew it was his duty. 

                All I can think of now is how sad it is that all those kids behind me now have to be taught by Mr. D and will never see the potential that education has. NKHS now has one of the lowest ratings a public high school can have. The administrator's blame the students for not having the motivation to learn and prosper, but what do you expect when you're being taught absolutely nothing by a chubby, balding, smelly man all day? And it wasn't only Mr. D, they're were countless teachers at North Kitsap High School that were the same way. Unresponsive, disrespectful, and uncaring. These are not the traits of a good teacher.

Mr. Olson respected the math, respected the school, respected himself, and most of all respected the students. Mr. D had none of those traits. A good teacher should be informative, yet interesting. Disciplinary, yet respectful. A good teacher truly cares about the growth of the student, like Mr. Olson did. If I hadn't been placed into Mr. Olson's class after I took Mr. D's class, I would be much worse of a student right now. I owe my education to Mr. Olson; he is a teacher that I will never forget.

              

Dead Poet Society Notes

·        Very invested in his students

·         The students are equally invested into learning

·         Doesn’t feel welcome with all the partyers

·         Gets beat up by a dumb jock

·         Enters an article in the newspaper in the name of the Dead Poets Society demanding women be admitted

·         Gets spanked with a wooden paddle as punishment

·         Neil’s father shows up

·         Tells him to quit the play no matter what

·         Tells Neil that he needs to talk to his father, tell him of his passion for acting

·         Reads a poem he wrote to Chris

·         Neil tells him that he told his father, but seems like he’s lying

·         Kris shows up

·         He convinces her to go to the play with him

·         She holds his hand during the play

·         Neil gets a standing ovation as his father watches

·         Neil’s father tells him that he is sending him to military school

·         Neil kills himself

·         School board is pinning Neil’s death on him

·         As he leaves, most of the students stand on their desks

Final Draft

Casey Price

English 101

How I Learned to Love Food

Growing up, I had always eaten food, and I always knew it was pretty darn good. But as I aged, I learned at being a picky eater is a flaw. I first learned this when I traveled to Japan when I was 13. I went without my parents, or anyone close for that matter, to a strange country. I had been traveling with a group of students all about my age, and a few of us decided we were pretty hungry. I, of course, assumed we were going to go to what I thought was McDonald's across the street, or maybe even the coffee shop that resembled Starbucks (as I couldn't read the signs). However, this was not the case. We went very far down the street, into a deep alley that you couldn't fit a Mini Cooper into. As soon as we exited the alley, we were in what seemed like the projects. The city was Osaka, a very urban area. Where we were at that moment was a huge food market. Sushi and rice were all over, of course, but there were also dishes that I have never heard of! One that we came up to was an octopus ball. No, not an octopus testicle, instead octopus meat that had been rolled into a ball, covered in a smaller octopus, stuffed with mayonnaise thrown onto a skewer with a few others and deep fried.

Now, up to that moment in my life, I had been a picky eater. I wanted to experience Japan, but this just seemed like too much for me. At that moment, I realized that if I ever wanted to enjoy retelling this experience later, I would need to eat the balls. So as quick as I could I shoved it into my mouth and took a bite, and it was amazing!

36% of adults in the United States are obese. Over one-third of the entire adult population in America alone are facing serious health risks due to poor exercise, and the number one cause, food. In a lot of cases the blame can be directed towards the fast food industry and some people may say it all comes down to labeling food and so on and so forth. What do I think? I think that people just love to eat.

Now, there is nothing wrong at all with loving to eat. In fact, I think its a good thing. Growing up, I didn't really enjoy to eat. I mean, of course I liked to snack on cookies and when I got hungry I tended to whine until I got what I wanted, but I assume that most of us were like that in our early childhood. It wasn't until I hit my teenage years that I really discovered how to love food.

I don't mean that I discovered how to love TO EAT food, no, I mean to love food in all ways. I personally don't believe that most of that 36% of adults in America really love food, they just love to eat it. Food is more than, well, food. Its art, its presentation, its color, smell, texture, taste, and so much more. I didn't know this, but once I opened that door I knew that I was never coming back.

You see, up until I was about 12 all I knew when it came to food was cheerios and chocolate, and of course my personal favorite at the time, PB&J with the crusts cut off. So when I took a trip to Japan by myself, I knew that it would be a learning experience for me, but I never expected it to change my opinion on anything.

I can't give credit to only Japan, of course. A lot of credit goes to my father, too. My father has been a food lover for as long as I can remember. There hasn’t been a single night where my father hasn’t watched at least one hour of the Food Network channel and cooked some crazy meal that I’ve never heard of.  The constant requests for me to taste his new sauce or help him dice up some onions and tomatoes have been engraved in my brain for the rest of my life, but if it wasn’t for all of that, I wouldn’t enjoy food as much as I do today.

There’s a different level of experience for certain things, and food is one of them. Most people, especially in America, don’t necessarily care about anything but the taste, but its so much more! Food is an art, from the processes used to prepare it and the presentation that it has when it hits your table, even the noises that it sometimes makes. The taste is just the final part, because after experiencing all of the preliminary works, the taste is what sums it all up and makes the whole thing worthwhile. Learning that lesson was one of the most important things that I have ever learned.

This lesson that I’ve learned has rippled through more than just my choice of food. I’ve also become much more open-minded and optimistic throughout all aspects of my life. I am now always willing to try any opportunity that is given to me, provided there’s a level of safety of course. I realize now that if it wasn’t for the lesson to not be afraid to try new things than I would be a completely different person. By and large, that attitude is part of who I am as a person.

I encourage everyone to try and be more optimistic, to see every opportunity as a chance to really live. I am glad that I learned to seize the day early in my life, because there are many people on this planet who haven’t learned that yet. Its really sad, actually, because I just wish that everyone could be able to understand how to really enjoy everything, not just food. So next time you’re eating at Mickey D’s, just try to imagine how much better it could get.

Stand and Deliver Notes; Day 2

Stand and Deliver

Day 1:

·         He speaks multiple languages

·         Class does not respect him

·         Can’t seem to get a hold of the class

·         Radio was stolen

·         He is obviously not meant for this area

·         Knows how to get the attention of the class

·         Slowly gaining respect

·         Two “thugs” show up late

·         Doesn’t tolerate disrespect

·         Very brutal

·         Very brave

·         Can get the class interested

·         Very in-your-face

·         Can get the whole class involved

·         Believes in the students

·         No one else believes in the students

·         Very passionate about his work

·         Just wants the students to succeed

Day 2:

·         Offends one of the students

·         Shows that he cares

·         Starts offending all of his students

·         He is starting to get obsessed with teaching

·         He is getting in pain

·         Leaving the classroom and falling down the stairs

·         Classmates are getting into fights

·         Blaming themselves

·         He had a heart attack

·         He has been receiving too much stress

·         Doctor says he can’t do any job related activity

·         Students are taking the AP test

·         All of the students passed the AP test

·         The AP service states that they all cheated

·         All of the students are falling apart

·         Angel has really grown, walking away instead of fighting

·         He’s starting to believe that it is all his fault