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.