Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computers | Video on TED.com

Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computers | Video on TED.com


this has less to do with diversity and more to do with modern pedogogy but it brings up an interesting question. If we assume the speakers theory would work, and accepting that the poorest schools (which ussually translating into urban minority schools) have the lowest math grades, why not redirect funding into what would be necessary to fund this type of learning in math.

what It really means to be a student

http://libcom.org/library/stop-country-take-back-future-italian-students-protest-education-reform


http://blip.tv/file/1891860

I ask you all, Find your star

This is the second to last post for this class. And yet I feel it necessary to return to my first post. We have been exposed in this class to facts in our modern society that are disillusioning and hopefully enraging. We have hopefully realized the living and oppressive existence of racism, classism, homophobia, paternalism and patriarchy, all in the name of the ruling class described synthetically by S.C.H.W.A.M.P. So then what do we do, if we accept the premise that as educators we must work beyond just the classroom to solve social injustice and thus ripen the possibilities in the classroom how do we go about it. I've come to my own conclusion on this and while in all honesty I don't have the energy at the moment to fully articulate it all I hope anyone would feel welcome to spark up a conversation on the topic and I'd happily go in depth. But in short I'll label it as such; through direct action solidarity with the community of oppressed minorities, through mutual aid, through revolutionary community building we can and must radically change society, our economic systems, and governmental bodies to mirror our dreams of a more egalitarian and truly democratic society in which the demands of the Mexican revolutionary Emanuel Zapata (Terra y Libertade, land and freedom) and that of the Blank Panther Party (Land, bread, housing, education, justice, and peace) can come to be fully realized. below are the link to two videos; the first is an inspiring interview of a Jewish anarchist revolutionary who survived the holocaust and came to this country and considered it his duty to work for social justice in his new home. The second is a description of a revolutionary educational method contrived in the escula mordena in Barcelona by a man by the name of Fransisco Ferrer y Guardia. It is a method I think we should all consider when we enter into this decrepit and oppressive system that I hope we aim to change.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR7dNntU5oI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwJzCLtLwnY

Reimagening democracy; Reconceptualizing Down Sydrome

Christopher Kliewer's chapter in Schooling Children with Down Syndrome titled "Citizenship in School: Reconceptualizing Down Syndrome." was for lack of a better adjective brilliant. I can honestly say this was my favorite of all the readings in this class. It succeeds to in an articulate and impactful manner deliver the message of heightening understanding of the needs of special needs and specifically Down syndrome children in schools and critically analyze the root evil that is rotten and rotting away schools and society as a whole. He expresses this regressive root of apathetic youth as "utilitarian individualism." Going on to say, "It assumes that 'the individual is prior to the society, which comes into existence only through the voluntary contract of individuals trying to maximize their own self-interest'...wherein self-indulgence is cultivated and satisfied" In essence this is the "rugged individualism" that Herbert Hoover diagnosed as the cure to this country's Great Depression; we saw how successful that was. This is a phenomenal expression of the root problem, while its always nice to hear someone openly criticise a system of capitalistic oppression through either class or socio-economic terms, but its refreshing to hear a criticism of the very socio-psychological foundation of capitalistic societies. Even more uplifting is that Kliewer doesn't still into a Poe-like gloomy spiral of condemnation with out offer of retribution and renewal. He makes the claim that when schools accept the role of citizen building as well as academic education (including a redefinition of "academic" then we can create and progress to a society in which democracy is not the long arm of utilitarian individualist whim but as Kliewer references in his piece, the Dewey inspired Democratic realization of society based on "Human reciprocity." (Democracy "is more than a form of Government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience." As such it is Kliewer's judgment that "schools must first reorganize themselves into locations where the three R's are posed as "problems, challenges, projects, and opportunities." This I find to be a wonderful synthesized suggestion for a first step towards a revolutionary change in the essential goal of education. This is also inseparable from the reformation of the definition of knowledge and specifically patterns of learning; to this Kliewer offers some brilliant starting categories: ("logical-mathematical, linguistical capacities, spatial-representation, musical, kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal.") These are a starting point yes, but they are a bridge hard built that we as future educators must devote our selves to constructing.

Educational tracking; Its like caste but with more paper work.

Caste:

A social class separated from others by distinctions of hereditary rank, profession, or wealth.

Tracking:

The placing of students in any of several courses of study according to ability, achievement, or needs. Also called ability grouping.

The Myth of Meritocracy:

"Ones life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtue of their own." Peggy McIntosh (white privilege, S.C.H.W.A.M.P.)

In the studies of both Jean Anyon and Jeanie Oakes demonstrating both tracking and pedagogical methods as proof of the modern education system functioning as a means of social status reproduction. Anyon shows that pedagogical methods vary drastically upon the determinate of class. Thus the working class, middle class, affluent professional, and executive elite schools as Anyon classified them showed a distinct trend in educating towards social class expected professions. As Anyon says, "rewarded for classroom behaviors that correspond to personality traits allegedly rewarded in different occupational strata-- the working classes for docility and obedience, the managerial classes for initiative and personal assertiveness." She goes on to justify this conclusion upon the basis of her and her colleagues research in various schools in New Jersey. To me the quote is a wonderful synthesis of critical theory concerning education. Peter Kroptkin once said of schools in his day as "super-ficial, parrot-like repetition, slavishness and inertia of words." The fact that in our modern day this epidemic of capitalist controlled social reproduction through public education has still not been addressed is a statement on the progressive degeneration of social class conscience in our country. Oakes emphasises this and broadens it in her explicit prosecution of tracking as a failure of education and a means of socializing class expectations. In "Tracking, Why Schools Need to Take Another Route" she says, "In low-ability classes, for example, teachers seem to be less encouraging and more punitive. Placing more emphasise on discipline and behavior and less on academic learning." Because when your poor and the cops are beating you or the boss is stealing your wages quoting John Locke doesn't tend to help very much. But learning to sacrifice your dignity, autonomy, and individuality can be useful in avoiding the sting of a baton or the indignation of the modern workplace. However, if your a child in what Anyon labels as Executive Elite schools, the children of the ruling oppressive minority, then education's "primary goal of thought is to conceptualize rules by which elements may fit together in systems and then to apply these rules in solving problems." Why? Because when these students grow up they can rest assured that they will be the ones to make the rules and theories that the working class students will slave under. So what do we do? how do we effect drastic social change in the route to a more egalitarian existence? We must educate the working and lower classes as these Elite schools are educating their students, empowering them and ingraining in them a sense of unrelenting autonomy. Parallel to this we must teach upon class consciousness and Democracy as a social model rather then a government and political buzz word.

No war but the Class War

"...public schools in the complex industrial societies like our own make available different types of educational experience and curriculum knowledge to students in different social classes. Bowles and Glintis for example, have argued that students in different social-class backgrounds are rewarded for classroom behaviors that correspond to personality traits allegedly rewarded in the different occupational strata-- the working-classes for docility and obedience, the managerial classes for initiative and personal assertiveness."

I think it's important when thinking about a topic like this to consider what is being labeled "working-class" I say this because especially when you listen to political discourse it seems that everyone who isn't taking in at least a million dollars is "middle class" (example bush tax cuts for the "middle class") In Jean Anyon's study the working class of this New Jersey school district have an average family income of 12,000$ 15% are at or below the federal poverty income line. Less than 1/3 of fathers are in skilled labor, 15% are unemployed with 30%+ having working mothers. The school studied as working class had an 85% white population. I think its a fairly reasonable definition of working class especially with the statistics showing a majority of parents in unskilled labor. Now the quote itself is what I was rantingly happy about the Mclaren reading, the focused and critical equivocation that the system of organization which is the ideological base for the state-business power infrastructure has a direct impact on almost every structure branching off of it. So as when a Capitalist system in which the top 22% of the population own 87% of the capital income of the national economy the system they erect to indoctrinate children into this social structure is designed to maintain this stratification. The majority of the reading goes on to justify this point.

The working class-school: "work is following the steps of a procedure. the procedure is ussually mechanical, involving rote behavior and very little decision making and choice... One teacher explained to me, "simple punctuation is all they'll ever use."
It's interesting how threatening and scary it could be to teachers and other power holders to see a young white child talking to a black child about the autobiography of Malcolm X they just read. Imagine that they were inspired to be educated, organized, and active like Malcolm X, why, they might actually change something.

compared to the Executive Elite school: "Work is developing one's analytical intellectual powers. Children are continually asked to reason through a problem, to produce intellectual products that are both logically sound and of top ACADEMIC (emphasis added) quality."

When they define academia and control its easy for them to indoctrinate their children into it. Then when the children of the lower classes make an attempt to confront them intellectually and their told they can't even participate in the argument unless they know the "proper" vocabulary it shuts down discussion in much the same way as the "silenced dialogue

Marxists; getting things done since 1848

"The development of an underclass in American society can be linked not only to econmic stratification due to capitalist relations of exploitation but also to racial stratification."

I was sooooo very happy to hear someone say that one of the broad factors for racial stratification is right beneath its surface, economic stratification. And to top it off McLaren even openly convicts the capitalist system as its cause. It ties in Delpit and Macintosh because it not only recognizes the structuralism of the culture of power but calls it and its causes out by name.

"Resistance, then, is a process in which the working-class student further solidifies his or her position in the lowest tier of the class system, helping to confirm the views established by critical theorists that a nations educational system is subservient to its economic system."

I have two things to say about this quote. First is, YES! EXACTLY! when an economic system emphasizes core values as a means of attaining livelihood those values will bleed into every other system under it and human personality as a whole. Second as McLaren continues he goes on to say this emphasize of working-class and manual labor ideals is counter productive. I don't think it this falls into the same pitfall as Delpit in assuming that the way to abolish a culture of power is to first assimilate into it. The working class are still the backbone of society and therefore when they come to see themselves as such in a organized fashion that can thus abolish the system which keeps in the lowest of classes from the outside.


"Because the school system is structured tacitly to reinforce and reward middle-class values, attitudes, and behavior (therefore penalize the "deprived" by omission), educators and the public alike often assume that the failure of schools to educated disadvantaged is really the failure of the girls themselves."


The system is not broken, it isn't failing. In fact it is succeeding brilliantly it keeps the classes were they are and degrades their traditions and ways so as to make children reach for the assertions of the ruling class and imitate them. You can not fix what is not broken, you can only tear it down and rebuild anew.