I found the article by Brown to be very interesting. I ecspecially liked the quote "Education has both enslaving and emancipatory possibilities." The article described the lock down mentality that schools have begun to adopt and how they resemble prisons or military camps. The school I student teach at does have this feel. There is something called "in-house" which is more or less in school detention/suspension. When i was a kid it was a terrible thing if you got detention, and you didnt even think about what would happen to you if you got a suspension. At this "in-house" you see a lot of the same kids EVERYDAY and it is always packed. Many of the kids actually would prefer to be there rather than in the classroom. This is a saddening thing because the school thinks as though they are punishing an action and correcting it when they are really allowing kids to be rewarded for bad behavior by getting out of the classroom. There is no educational benefit from this.
I have been student teaching at an MPS middle school and I am going on my 5th year at the rec. department and many of these kids lack parents in the home. Many of these children have behvioral issues, and dealing with it is a tricky thing. You want to find a way to help it, but in the classroom you can not let these kids misbehavior affect the other students. So the easy thing for the school to do is to remove these students. Its easy to say that curriculum can solve this, by having fun and interesting activities. But no matter what lesson you do there will always be kids that it fails to reach. Not all activities can be extremely exciting and entertaining. Students must learn at some point that they are responsible for thier own work, even if the material is not of great interest to them. They need to learn responsibility and that if they fail to do something it will have negative consequences. There have been 2 teachers in the classroom i have been student teaching in, one was more loose with the students but provided material in a more interesting way and the other one has been more milataristic in hopes of bettering the students behavior through structure. As of yet, this milateristic approach has not worked. Students have become even more disconnected from their studies. I think the best approach is the one that is most suitable to the group of students at hand. And to take this further i dont think you can have only one approach, you need to know each student individually and realize what they respond the best to.
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I also question the whole notion of sending kids out of class. While it may be neccessary at times, I see it as overused in my school also. All it takes to get sent out of the room seems to be talking out of turn once. With this, as sheff said, kids know that all they have to do to get out of class is act out and it will be a matter of minutes before they're someplace else. As mentioned, i see no educational benefit to this.
ReplyDeleteanother "lock down" mentality thing that I always questioned was the idea of silent lunch. I have heard the arguments for silent lunch and, to me, they don't make sense. Middle school kids LOVE to talk. To me, if you take away their time to talk at lunch time, they're just going to talk in class.
Alright fellas. I agree with you on a few major points here. First, the whole suspending kids thing needs to be rethought. How can a kid ever get a decent education if they are serving an out of school (or in school) suspension once every couple of weeks. At my school, we have kids who get suspended every week or two. They always show up to class either a day or two later and don't have any of the work and have missed all that class time I spent lecturing and helping them with homework. It only seems to continue the cycle of misbehavior. In middle school, would you pay attention in a classroom you had no idea what was going on in?? I don't think so.
ReplyDeleteSecond, it seems that lots of teachers send students out too immediately. I do agree that in a classroom full of 30 kids, at times you do need to remove a kid who is being a major distraction. But this policy of removing kids for talking out of turn? Nonsense! I have removed 2 kids from my classroom this semester and one was after he hit another student and the other was after the kid refused to sit down after I asked him to do so repeatedly during class. Those are cases when it is better to make sure you are teaching the majority of the classroom--even if it comes at the expense of one "problem" student.
But I do feel like our schools here in MPS are very similar to prison. Students have to dress a certain way, have to line up in the hall and be totally silent before we go to lunch and often have silent lunch. How is this helping kids learn!?!?!
I agree that some of the prison like stuff may not be necessary; however, I don't feel that kids just learn responsibility by holding them responsible. I have a few students that regardless of how good their day is going education-wise, they still fail to do homework. I think as an instructor in MPS we have to go out of our way to accommodate students in order to maintain at least minimum standards and if that's through creative curriculum so be it. Only if we model responsibility within lessons and the classroom can we hold students accountable.
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