Response to a classmate #1:

Flipping Burgers – History

Historically, teachers assumed that students from higher socio-economic backgrounds would always outperform students who were more disadvantaged. From your own experience, what evidence do you see that teachers are still making these kinds of assumptions?

I really enjoyed reading your reply to the history prompt. I feel that the personal experiences you chose to share shed light on how we individually have seen different instances of socio-economic status possibly affecting students’ performance in school.

I have also worked with the students of Beattie Elementary, and I was quite surprised when all their parents came to pick up in their children from school in Audi’s and BMW’s because at the time I didn’t know you had to pay for your child to go there. From my personal experience working there, I have come to conclude that there is a fine line between being wealthy enough to be living comfortably and spending time with your family, being able to help your children with their homework, and reading to them at night, versus being so affluent that your life consists of working and sleep. There is something to be said for the middle class having the benefit of a good education, and their parents working a traditional 9:00-5:00 day job, rather than low-income families that are juggling multiple jobs to make ends meat, or even very affluent parents that are consumed with their workload and may not have the time to spend with their children. With this I am not taking into consideration the effect high entry cost private schools… I would be very interested to learn about how different private education is in comparison to public education!

Something else I began to thought about when reading your response was immigrant families that speak English as their second language or do not speak English at all. I am currently working with a student at Beattie that’s family was very well off financially, yet the student and her family can only speak Spanish. This is a large social barrier between her and the other students, as well as between the teacher and family. However, the school has come to pull many resources together in order to support the student and her family as much as possible. What I think is interesting about this, is that I have worked in schools in lower-income areas as well where many of the parents cannot speak English, and the schools’ teachers and administration simply write it off as something they can do nothing about, and they have just accepted that they cannot communicate with one another, rather than making the smallest effort to better the students’ education by using google translate to create a newsletter as a tool to aid the child education.

Response to a classmate #2:

Bang Bang you’re Dead- History

Do you think we, as a society, have become more tolerant of violence as depicted on television and in video games? What evidence would you use to support your position?

 

Great response Alex!  I absolutely agree that as teachers, we need to be able to inform students as much as possible about the realities and fantasies we see through multimedia; however, in this new era of ultra-realistic fantasy technology that’s coming out, how do we do this?
The case study discusses how realistic video games can replicate gunshots and injuries, which I ague we may not be able to decipher if the gunshot is real or fantasy without context. If I am watching a movie with my favourite actor and he gets shot in a movie, I have a good understanding that the special effects team was so talented that they could make the gunshot look real. However, in the age of “fake news” being constantly blasted through media, how can we tell if the media we are watching is real or fake if we have no idea who is creating the news stories photos, and videos we are watching. Because what happens when what we are watching appears to be real, but in fact, is created using computer programming, and it is 100% fake? Confused? Click this link and watch how special effects can create photorealistic fake videos https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/4/17/17247334/ai-fake-news-video-barack-obama-jordan-peele-buzzfeed.

I believe we should be teaching students to question the nature of what they are looking at, and questioning whether or not they think it is real or if had been created using special effects, what are reliable souses and how to find information using these reliable souses, and fact-checking the information they’ve collected use multiple sources.

 

Response to a classmate #3:

Alone in a Crowd: The Case

What strategies did Jim use to support Darlene in the classroom? How effective were these strategies?

The personal experience you wrote about is very interesting to me, and it really made me think about how these adaptations to the students’ day began and how long they will last for in their academic career. I remember being in elementary school and two of the students in my grade both had an individually set positive reinforcement plan and would have time outside of the class for “breaks” with what I would look back at and assume was a CEA. But looking back, the CEA’s seemed to stop coming around as grade 5, at least as frequently as they did before in previous grades. Individual positive reinforcements were still used until grade 7 for both of the students in my class, but what happens next? What happens when these students transition into middle school or high school and struggle with the lack of support, more bells and busy transition times, and a higher volume of people? How can we support these students learning of personal and social awareness not only in grades  K-7 but somehow creating opportunities for students to gain experience and confidence in uncomfortable and overwhelming situations rather than avoiding them altogether? Perhaps this is what the CEA’s in my elementary school was working on with the students that needed additional help, and over time they were able to do things on their own and feel more comfortable in overwhelming situations! Reading your response really opened up my eyes and made me realize that I have no idea what CEA’s do, and I really need to learn more about the support systems within schools!