Exploring Education with Courtney

My thoughts have been all over the place since going to school to work has been shut down because of COVID-19. I have suddenly become an "online teacher" using solely online platforms to produce, deliver, assign, and assess Spanish. In addition to all of this, I am finishing grad school. I am so close to the finish line but I am still so far. I am sad that my plans to finish grad school in Spain have been cancelled due to the pandemic. I am sad that all of my life has been turned into working from home. I never realized how much I enjoyed face to face interactions with students, colleagues, and cohort classmates. I do, however, enjoy the daily pajamas to the nighttime pajamas, access to the bathroom and refrigerator whenever I want, and have been enjoying meeting my neighbors due to the multiple neighborhood walks I take daily. I am also enjoying working from my home office which I have really never ever used before. I am taking the weekend to not do any teacher work, and sol...

In your experience as a teacher, when/where/how have you found yourself participating in “the teacher’s lounge?” Address your own awareness of, participation in, and avoidance of the deficit thinking that comes with the teacher’s lounge? In my early teaching years, I hadn’t been warned of the teachers lounge like the teacher in the article mentioned. I made many teacher friends and we enjoyed lunch together. We hardly ever talked about colleagues or students during lunch! The negativity began during my fifth or sixth year of teaching when I found myself caught in the web of a department full of adult drama. I heard stories about teachers before I met them, and I was told to believe it all to be true. I heard stories about students and I was supposed to go along and call them a pain in the..., too. I was engulfed in gossip. It was not necessarily in the lunch room because we typically ate in our classrooms or in a common departmental area. Sometimes even in passing between classe...

This week, we read a chapter by Jean Anyon called, “What “counts” as educational policy? Notes toward a new paradigm.”   In this chapter, she investigates educational experiences made available to students of various social-class contexts, examines reforms in urban education, and presents her thoughts on education policies over the past seventy-five years, highlighting the reasons behind why failing education policies are systemic in low-income, inner-city areas. In addition, she provides the reader with evidence that poverty directly impacts a student’s education. Anyon states, “Of countervailing power, however, is research demonstrating that when parents obtain better financial resources or better living conditions, the educational achievement of the children typically improves significantly. These findings empirically support the argument that for the urban poor, even with the right educational policies in place, school achievement may await a family’s economi...

In the first reading from Chapter 8 of Power and Control in American Education, Local Control, Choice, Charter Schools, and Home Schooling , the author Joel Spring has us readers examine the questions "Who controls American education?" and"Who decides what knowledge is of most worth to teach to students?" (Spring, 219)  He also asks, "Do you think public schools should let parents decide what should be taught to their children?" (Spring, 220) These are questions I have nor really spent too much time examining and dissecting as a general thought with the exception of looking at what is taught in my subject area of Foreign Language. However, I find these questions extremely essential and looking deeply into them is crucial to move forward in education. We must look at representation as the chapter points out, and we must remember to represent all to the best of our ability in the public realm. In addition, Spring has us think abo...

This week’s readings really tied in several of the educational topics we have been examining so far this semester. In Community as text: Using the community as a resource for learning in community schools , Martin J. Blank, Sheri DiBoe Johnson, and Bela P. Shab present the many benefits of linking community and school: motivated and engaged students, improved reading, language, math skills and test scores, participation of all students regardless of ability, and high standards and expectations for students to mention a few. The following video provides the teacher perspective on community schools. The four models they describe are “service-learning, academically based community service, environment as an integrating context for learning, and place-based education.” (Blank, Johnson, Shab 111) I was extremely interested in the way the Spanish teacher utilized the service-learning model with her students. She “uses service to relay the importance of understanding other ...