Curriculum Blog

Curriculum is about content and presentation.  We all know that as teachers we should supply information in an engaging way- something that sticks with students after the lesson is over. Curriculum, whether mandated or planned out individually, should contain what they will be tested on later because that is what the states demand.  But it should also involve creativity on the teacher's part and other relative information to the past, present and future, as well. This sounds like a heavy load to place upon teachers but it doesn't have to be.
I liked our discussion in class about substitutes not teaching to the lesson plan or what to do if a lesson plan isn't included for the sub that day at all.  I would feel lost if I had no frame of reference and I imagine a student would, as well. I think lesson plans are essential for those who have trouble staying on track. They are helpful for those who have better organizational skills, too, to keep classroom setting flowing along and keeping a smooth pace.  I am not teaching yet so so far I have no problem with mandated curriculum. What I have a problem with is the expectancy to read plans verbatim without bringing any of one's own personality to the students. 
One special ed teacher I observed expressed her disinterest in this and went ahead and did her own thing while still sticking to what is expected of her from her school and bosses.  I liked her attitude towards her students because I could tell she was being herself with them and since she was, they were comfortable with her. She said the lesson plan said to say, "Good morning class. Today we will be learning..." and we both kinda laughed at this robotic excuse of teaching.  She said, of the students, "This would never work for me. They'd never buy it anyways." 
In Lemov's "Teach Like A Champion",  he writes that teaching is an art form - a skill refined with time. I believe curriculum is the same since it is a huge part of being a teacher. It will have to be formed per class and according to how those students learn the most -which will be best determined with time and patience and practice.    

Bias Blog

To be brutally honest, I am bias against black males ages ranging from 19-25.  My best friend from age 16-25 was a black male with more talent in his pinky than i had in my whole body.  He was going to a prestigious high school on a scholarship due to his brightness. He sang like an angel and he was involved in every kind of sport known to man.  How we became friends was and still is a mystery due to the fact that i was raised in white small town America. It was a beautiful, strictly platonic friendship.  We appreciated cultural differences and learned a lot from each other. We told each other everything.  If he came to visit me, he stuck out and I was honestly scared he'd get harassed by our small town police force. If I visited him, I was scared there weren't any police that would come around, and we could laugh about these differences.  Anyways, when we got older and started college together, he got weird and distant and different and secretive.  My trust in him and our friendship started to break.  He started doing drugs, failing out of school and then he got his girlfriend pregnant and dropped out of school.  A huge disappointment to his mom who worked so hard for him to have a great education. He would push me away but beg for my help. It was a tumultuous time.  After our ties started to sever, he called me one day out of the blue and told me he needed to talk to me. So I went to his house eager to help and hear what he had to say.  He literally lost his damn mind in front of me.  I saw all color escape his eyes as he ranted and raved incoherently. I had never been so scared in my life. I was looking at a stranger. The friend I knew was long gone. It is an extremely bizarre situation to 'know' someone so well and intimately turn into an unknown psycho right before your eyes. I was young and had no idea how to handle it. I tried to leave knowing there was no way I could rationalize with him. He snapped. He broke everything in his path. He got extremely violent with me. He broke his pregnant girlfriend's face. It was sad and horrifying and took me a long time to recover-not to mention the PTSD.   
I don't think this scenario is good cause for fear and predjudice. I just know where mine stems from.  This would effect my teaching if i was interested in teaching high school, but I have no interest in teaching this age group.  Perhaps it still will cause problems in my future career.  I don't like the nervous, anxious, horrified feeling that comes over me when I see someone who looks like him (and no, I do not think all black males in this age group look like him). It's unnerving. I never had feelings like this towards a gender or an ethnicity or and age group. It makes me feel racist. I'm sure I sound racist. I still would like to think that I'm not but there's some ill feelings from the past that come up from time to time. This blog wasn't an easy one, guys. Let's not all get real judgey on each other, okay?  

Amy's ABQ Journal Article

After years of hard work and dedication, the Teacher of the Year Award went to thirty-five year old Amy Ford.  Ford has been working with the Albuquerque Public School system ever since finishing the ATL program at CNM in 2010.  She has been working at High Town Elementary for the past five years, one of New Mexico's lowest graded elementary schools.  Ford has increased literacy rates for High Town forty-one percent from 2012 to 2017.  She developed after school workshops with kids ranging from 2nd to 5th grade and opened up her own time for those interested in extra help.  She asked parents of her students to get involved and volunteer, too. Most were happy to oblige.
 Mrs. Henderson, a mother of five (two of which were Ford's students) said, "My kids loved working with her.  My youngest, Sandra, was having troubles sounding out the words. I didn't have the extra time to work with her one on one, so Miss Ford's program really helped with that. When I'd come to pick Sandra up, I could see how happy she was and how much she improved on her reading skills.  After my schedule cleared up, I took my older kids with me and helped Amy work with Sandra and other students. It was a joy."  
Being patient and understanding is a huge part in teaching. High Town and Ford's administrator Jane Caldwell, seemed pleased to have someone amongst the staff raising the bar.  Caldwell is happy to have Ford on her team.  She said, "I hope she stays with us a while.  Coworkers here at High Town get together Thursday mornings to talk about classroom structure and how things are going with students and what needs to be improved on.  Amy has brought with her and developed a real sense of camaraderie amongst the teachers that I haven't seen in my career in quite some time.  It's refreshing to work together and have a support system within one's profession." 
Ford and Caldwell worked together even further with coworkers and parents for their school.  They raised money through fundraisers for better school supplies, more books, and in two years, raised and collected enough money for a small computer lab. Ford said, "the kids were so excited.  We have five computers now so they have to take turns, but just to have it available to them is great.  That's what it's all about- making school a pleasurable experience for the kids, making it fun for them to learn." One of Ford's 3rd graders named Chelsea said, "I like Miss Ford's class. Sometimes it is hard, but that's o.k. I think she's cool."  Spoken like an honest student! 
        When asked why Amy Ford went into teaching, she replied, "I wanted to give back to a community that was in need of something- a change, if you will, make a difference as cliche as that may sound.  Kids are really the best teachers.  They teach us patience with ourselves, the importance of innocence, and they remind us of a world before prejudice exists.  The kids make this job rewarding.  I'm not a native New Mexican but I love New Mexico and how much its taught me about culture and teaching mulitculturally and I couldn't be happier."
Ford is well deserving of the Teacher of the Year Award with all her achievements in 2017.  The positive effects she has had on her students in her relatively short and new teaching career shows how much she cares about students and student progress. All of us here at Albuquerque Journal say, keep up the good work Miss Ford!

Amy's phlogg 4

As far as Superbowl predictions go, I have none. I don't even know who's playing. But I am a bit of a gambler, so I've entered into some Superbowl pools with my fam. Haven't a clue what the numbers mean.  I have been lucky enough to win the past 3 years in a row, though, which infuriates my relatives and increases my love of the Superbowl Sunday. So there's bliss to my football ignorance.  I do not find bliss fits in with ignorance when it comes to teaching, however. Ha!
My purpose in teaching is to utilize my degree with my best capabilities. I want to help students read and write and find their own voice while recognizing others' voices through literature. Literature and language are so important, socially.  It is how we learn from one another and about each other.  If I'm passionate about it, I believe it will reflect through the way I teach content.  If I'm interested, I can help student interest level raise, right?  This relates socially in the context of everything, really.  What one can do if literate is infinite, I believe.
At the literary services I volunteered at, I heard so many stories of adults (some in their 50's and 60's) telling me how they went through life unable to read.  Street signs, job applications, groceries, things we take for granted, they had to find ways around the words to function in already complex society.  Each person's story expressed the same desire to want to read and write and being shuffled through a system without any help to do so. Some of these adults had a high school diplomas!!  As these people grew older, so did their desire to learn.  Each person I talked to expressed a belief that being literate would lead to a happier being and they would be more likely to succeed.  As a bit of a word nerd, I can't even imagine a life without the ability to read.  It caused me to wonder if my education was due to my color, class, geographic location, etc.  I refuse to believe that anyone should have to go through life without being taught to read and write if it in their interest to do so.    
 Being 'the other' in a class, gender, ethnicity context may be difficult enough in this world without adding illiteracy to the mix.  The more people that read and write and articulate themselves, the more it creates a voice of their own.  This would benefit under-privileged citizens greatly.  Through literacy and language, voice can be found. And individual voice encourages people to write about their situations or release fear of oppression expression.  Audre Lorde's article talked about how relating within inequality can be helpful and create new definitions of power.  More voices, more stories, more power within stories and thus, more positive change.    
I want my classroom to be multi culturally aware.  I want to be challenged in my way of thinking when it comes to diversity. I want to instill a desire to read for pleasure within my students.  I want students to be able to identify a book that would interest him/her to read on their own. These are my purposes in teaching.
How I will execute these goals, I imagine will be trial and error.  I'll try and adopt some equity pedagogy. I will choose to believe that every student can learn.   I like assessing through written comments, especially when it comes to papers that are due. I don't know how teachers expect students to better their writing skills if all they receive is a letter grade at the top of the page and no feedback on how to improve. These are my thoughts, folks.  Feed back is much appreciated.         

Amy's 3rd week blog

I liked Nora Fleming's "Beyond School" blog through blogs.edweek.org.  Her blog provides statistics and other information about current school programs being funded from various sponsors.  Fleming writes about how much funding is being supplied for things like "Think Together" and "At Higher Achievement" and how these programs seem to be working. I like how she gives this information and her knowledge of education in a precise, logical manner without being too dry to her readers.  She also supplies many other links to other reports in her blogs which I found to be helpful.  Her blog might be a positive source for professional connections in one's teaching career. 
I think it is important to include positive information when it comes to national education because most of the statistics can be so disheartening.  Matt Miller's article, "First, Kill All the School Boards," was full of sad but true statistics about American schooling and funding for education.  He writes, "Half of black and latino students in the U.S. don't graduate on time (or ever) from high school."  That right there was enough to bum me out for the rest of my own school year. But also enough for me to want to be a part of a system that can change that.  Miller knows that eliminating school boards would be beneficial but difficult since "...school boards are in effect, accountable to no one" but at "we can at least limit their role."  He suggests that the U.S. have one set of national standards which I can agree with for progress purposes.  If each state has different standards, how are we to gauge educational progress as a whole country? His 'solutions' or starts to sollutions have merit and are not unfathomable.  They just demand a lot of hard work with changing an entire system ( that clearly is not working to its full potential).  Fleming's blog and Miller's article, amongst other things, made me realize that I am politically UNaware and need to educate myself more on these national issues.  I fully intend on doing so, by the way, fellow bloggers.            

Amy's 2nd blog

My personal philosophies come from my past, and from all that I've been through and experienced. I believe people are inherently good. I believe there is more good in this world than evil.  I'm thankful for the upbringing I've had. Therefore, I am excited to teach in a way that reflects this. The golden rule has never escaped me, no matter what life has presented to me-which has not always been sunshine and lolly pops. That being said, my philosophy of education is evolving.  I see it now in its early development stage. I expect it to change with the more I learn and the more experiences I gain.  I've never written a personal philosophy of education before. I grew up in a small town. Went to college in a huge and diverse city.  I never had to think about teaching mulitculturally until I became involved as a tutor at the literary services of Wisconsin.  I taught English as a second language to primarily native Spanish speakers.  I used the first 15 minutes of each session as a get-to-know-you conversation.  It allowed me and the student to relax, get acquainted, and grasp where our language skills were at.  Difference is apparent and instead of ignoring it, it should be embraced and addressed in an open way.  It can be terrifying.  I know I was incredibly intimidated with my limited amount of Spanish speaking skills but I moved forward.  I was honest about my skill level and the students were honest if they understood me or not.  If not, I took another approach.  Those tutoring sessions were incredibly challenging but so rewarding because I felt like they operated solely on respect.
I liked how in Perkin's and Gomez's article and through "Linnea's story", she explains how she tried to take a 'colorblind approach to instruction,' but then went on to say how this created more tensions within her classroom.  It also hindered her performace as a teacher and almost ruined her relationship with her student, Plumer.  Instead of accepting her inexperience within a diverse setting, she feared to address it in a positive way.  This story's honesty acknowledges the importance of how knowing one's self is vital to one's career, especially as a teacher.
I believe teaching is situational.  Many believe they are to teach to a class as a whole.  The students are individuals which as teachers I believe are not to lose sight of. Getting to know these individuals is key to know who you are dealing with and how to get your point across. A good teacher was always someone who made me feel like I mattered as an individual and whom expressed care as to whether I grasped the content presented to me.
I believe education should be built on interest. And I know that it helps when teaching that we're interested to. While tutoring, I would ask students what they wanted to work on for that session. I understand that most teachers don't have this kind of freedom for their classrooms but even asking them and giving them a choice, relieves tension. I believe education and teaching are about respect; respect for one's self and others' ability. Education is at the same time, a personal experience.  There is sense of ownership to it which is important because it's linked with self pride.     
    If I tie myself to beliefs that i deem positive, and project them to students, I won't fail myself.  For example, I believe reading to children is positive and beneficial to their development. It was my favorite thing when I was little so is there projection here, yes, but to a beneficial point.  Can we argue that in this example, there is harm or ill intent even if it stems from my personal experiences?  How else do we grow as individuals if not from learning from experience?  Acknowledging inexperience, fears within, strengths, weaknesses, differences makes for a solid base of furthering education and exploring openness to change for one's philosophy of such. 

Educators were those who instilled a desire within me to learn. This is not an easy task and even at a young age, i appreciated this more than other things from my teachers. I'm trying to decide whether it was a fear of failing or an actual desire to be smarter that was my main motivation as a young learner.  Perhaps it was both.  Before I realized this truth and knew it as such, my very first teachers were my parents. My first school was my home.  Home life to me was what was real and school was this other thing- this pretend place i had to go to, get through, and someday, I would be gone from.  I loved learning new things but did not enjoy the act of sitting in class for eight hours a day.I believe school is not for the right place for everyone but I also believe it is such an important part of life and growing as a person.  It wasn't until after high school that i started getting into the whole school thing.  College prepared me to excel in my pursuit of knowledge within a subject that I loved.  When I was dictating my class schedule, paying for it on my own, learning what I wanted to learn, and studying what interested me, then my education became my own-something that I felt I was in charge of and belonged to me personally.  Because of these emotions, I felt like a better student because I knew how hard I was trying to succeed.  My college years helped me to appreciate all the 'hard teachers' that I had in high school because I realized they helped to prepare me for 'the real world'. I have come to realize that there is so much more to the term, the definition, and the reality of education itself than preparation, although i believe that has a part to play. Interaction and socialization (from birth on) are also important factors into how one learns and grows. John Dewey's article expressed such emphasis on school as a social institution which I can agree with. School becomes a home away from home, so to speak.  It is where we form friendships and learn how to work with others that are so different from ourselves with such different backgrounds- it helps to gain perspective and think outside of our individual situations.  I will strive, as a teacher, to help students learn to accept and appreciate others' differences and hopefully through this hope, guide them in a way to trust themselves and take ownership of all they want out of their education.