My journey through Graduate School to earn a Masters of Art in Education. I was on track to become a teacher, but now everything has changed, and I'm on the job hunt with a Bachelor's in Liberal Arts and a Master's in Education with no teaching certificate.

 
The last day of classes this week. I'm pretty sure I'm allergic to something on that campus and I have to get used to taking a pill every day to address it. Today started with Literacy, as usual, and I found something quite frustrating. I will be teaching Mathematics and I thought of a great lesson plan for History or Social Studies teachers. I thought of a good way to get the students to interact with history. Take some controversial debate in history, and give the students a brief introduction to the time, area, and climate. Pass out cards with opinions on the matter and have the students form camps and debate the issue. Only after they settle things let them know what happened historically. It is a bit to set up of course, but if I had gotten to do stuff like that in high school I wouldn't have failed those classes.

In Literacy we began to discuss constructivism and tried to answer the question "Where is learning located?" Does learning occur in the brain, the individual, or society? We got a brief overview of Noam Chomsky and how he contrasts to the behaviorists point of view. We also had another fun look at how we read. We were told to read the following sentence: "_ ___ __ ___ __________ ______." The words had the following number of letters: 1, 4, 2, 3, 10, and 6. We began with the first word and knew it had to be 'A' or 'I', since there are no other one letter words in the English language. We went through the entire sentence to illustrate that language is a cue-based system. One bit of information and our prior knowledge cues us to understand the next bit of information. We also, according to the instructor, can make several insignificant errors when reading and not bother to go back and correct ourselves. The syntatic difference between 'A cat ran past' and 'The cat ran past' is minimal, and the context of the next sentence clears things up and we probably don't notice. I also know from my graphic design and typography years that we look at the shape of words to read them, which is why block letters can be hard to read and why we can read a sentence if the bottom of the letters are missing, but if the tops of the letters are missing we can't read very well.

We finished the class discussing synthetic theories vs. holistic theories of reading, and in fact we use both when we read. It depends on which method is more useful to us. We coverd prototype theory which reminded me of Platos Theory of Perfect Forms.

We had our last two training sessions for the small group tutoring that we start next week. We covered Excel, which does much more than a spread sheet should, and Inspiration, which is a good program for diagraming thoughts. The last one was about diversity and how we should recognize it and approach it. As a math teacher I don't see how I can treat it multiculturally like I could with history or social studies. I can be aware of the multicultural facets of my students and I plan on explaining the rich history of math that doesn't come from purely western traditions. At the wrap up for these sessions we met our team members and got some information about our students. I have two partners, S and J, and the two students are A and R. (Can you tell I've been reading Ian Flemings James Bond books?) S and J are going to teach social studies, and A and R both indicated that they'll need help with math. R wants help with the college entrance exames and A will probably take the first year of Algebra for a second time. I warned J that I might show a tendency to take over these sessions and gave him permission to take me aside and tell me to shut up.

The afternoon session was the Dimensions of Learning class which continued to pique my interests. We reviewed the history perspectives on the purpose of education and began to review the philosophical perspectives. We had to look at answers to the question "Why do we put our young in schools?" In my high school days I understood the answer to be "because if I don't go to school I'll get busted for truancy." We looked at Progressivism, Social Reconstructivism, and Critical Theory. On Tuesday we will finish up with Perrenialism and Essentialism. I'm looking forward to those because the students tend to think like liberals and the information we were given labels these two as conservative points of view. It will be fun to watch.
posted by Josh English at 6/26/2003 09:11:00 PM