How did my high school experience compare with Gatto's claims?

Honestly, I consider myself pretty fortunate. I went to O’Dea high school in Seattle, and I think most of the teachers there were exceptionally good. Of course, there were teachers that were pretty boring at times, and I wondered why we were learning something that I would never use, but most of the time I got lucky. I think as long as the teachers are enthusiastic about the material they are teaching, the students will be too.  The thing I liked most about my school is that our school days were relatively short (8:20-2:20) We had three minute passing periods, 52 minute classes, and a 20 minute lunch break. In other words, our school days were really crammed with classes. It made the school days go faster, and it gave us more time to focus on our homework, and extra curricular activities. The teachers really tried their hardest to cram each class with a lot of content and group activity. Honestly, I really did like high school a lot. All of the teachers and students got along and the rules were very laid out at my school. I definitely didn’t go to a normal high school; I think my educational experience is something special.

My thoughts on Chalk

Chalk was a good movie, but it was a little hard to follow. It’s a quick 84-minute film that sums up the story of a whole school year at Harrison high from the teachers point of view. Mr. Stroope is very determined to get teacher of the year, but some of his students are a little smarter than he is. He gets along well with the students, and keeps them interacted, but he is not a very good teacher. He gets mad when he doesn’t win, and throws a hissy fit in his own classroom. Mean time Mr. Lowrey, a first year history teacher is struggling to find his passion in teaching. He used to be a computer engineer and he is boring in the classroom. He doesn’t get the students excited about class, and he hesitates when he teaches. The PE teacher Coach Webb tries desperately to get the school back in order. She tries disciplining the students for being late, but none of the teachers will respect her even though she is probably the best teacher in the school. Some of the students think she is gay, and she is not happy about that. Towards the end of the movie, she becomes interested in Mr. Lowrey. I think overall the movie was pretty funny, and an accurate example of how our unorganized public schools function in todays world.

Chalk Illustrations 2

In “The Answer Sheet by Mike Rose” He says that students are not getting an engaging and challenging education. While watching chalk Mr. Lowrey had an incident with one student. While he was attempting to discipline the one, he left the rest of the class complete unattended and disengaged. After the public altercation the classroom was laughing out of what seemed to be embarrassment. He says “im going to leave, and when I come back I want to see who is going to teach this class.” There were several incidents when his classroom was told to “just read” or “just learn what’s on the board.” There was one time when he even had his classroom learning something that didn’t even pertain to that specific class. 
On the Daily Show, Lewis Black, did a segment called “Back in Black.” He showed a portion where the students reflected to the camera their thoughts of their teacher. A girl says “I’m actually very concerned that he is not even qualified to be a teacher” We can relate this to Mr. Lowrey becoming a history teacher because a career placement test told him he would make a good history teacher. Mr. Lowery had no prior training or teaching experience, so obviously when he gets into the teaching scenario he is not going to deliver. Mr. Lowery was so introvert that he could not relate to his students, although he made a solid effort towards the end. I would suggest he would be the type to complete a technical writing.

Chalk Illustrations 1

In Freire’s “The Banking Concept of Education.” He says that a serious issue with the banking concept of learning is the mentality of “the teacher knows everything and the student knows nothing”. While watching Chalk, there was a time when the history teacher “Mr. Stroope” held one of his students after class to talk with her. The teacher asked the student not to know more than him in class. He asked the student to “dumb” down her knowledge of Social Studies, to make the rest of the class feel like he knew it all, he was the one with the brain. 
In Gatto’s “Against Schools, How Schools Cripple Our Kids.” He says “I feel I had to defy the custom, bend the law, to help kids break out of the trap of boredom.” Coach Webb seemed to express this same desire. She took her students into a classroom and instead of doing the normal physical education she told them they were going to be trying something different. She then led them into some “awkward’ yoga positions. One kid admitted to feeling “hot and vulnerable” which then caused the class to erupt in laughter and become more engaged in the activity. 

Similarities between Garfield high school and Welton academy

Garfeild high school and Welton academy are both extremely different. Garfield high school is located outside of Los Angeles, and the students that go there are kind of just pushed through the system. All the students are taught to the test and nothing beyond that. The teachers aren’t excited about what they are teaching, so the students really cant get excited either. The students don’t really have anything to look forward to, so no of then are motivated to try hard in school. Ofcourse, Mr. Escalante made them believe they could do better things with their life, but he is a exceptionally motivating teacher. Welton academy on the other hand is a private all boys boarding school. The boys are forced to think about school 24/7, and they are also expected to do very well. Welton academy is very traditional and by looking at the way the students are dressed, you can tell the school is top of the line.  Mr. Keating and Mr. Escalante attempted to change the good/bad images of these schools.

Mr. Escalante vs. Mr. Macfarland

After reading Mike Rose’s essay I would say that Mr. Escalante and Mr. Macfarland are very similar. It seems like both teachers push their students to work their very hardest by assigning them homework everyday, and constantly testing their skills. I think Mr. Macfarland was the stricter of the two teachers, and he assigned much more work then Mr. Escalante. But, I think Mr. Escalante was also more one on one than Macfarland. Both teachers had a lot of times where they would help students outside of the classroom, and that is a rare quality to find these days in a teacher. Most teachers don’t get paid enough nowadays to even bother with the students outside of school hours. Both of these teachers really had a personal interest in their student’s grade, and personal life. Mr. Macfarland and Mr. Escalante both are extremely good teachers, with slightly different teaching methods

Is Mr. Escalante a good teacher? (Catching up)

After watching “Stand and Deliver” all of the way through, I consider Mr. Escalante a good teacher, because he achieved his goal of teaching his students calculus. He walked into class on the first day completely unprepared expecting to teach another class, and he still got the motivation to sit down and help the students learn how to do advanced math. Mr. Escalante was very strict at some points in the movie, and a lot of the time he was extremely unrealistic. He would criticize the students for everything they did wrong, and make them practice and practice until they did it the right way. He was one of those teachers that believed that you work and work at something until you can do it flawlessly. He made his students still come to class over their Christmas break, and work on learning calculus in time for the big test. I certainly would not want to take a class from Mr. Escalante because he expects an unreasonable amount of work from you, but I consider him a good teacher because he communicates well with his students and he tells you exactly what he expects.

Final Draft- Paper #2

Jimmy Sund

Formal Paper #2

     I believe that when someone attends high school, they truly learn more than ever about the world outside of education. Its crazy to think that some of your classmates in high school never really bothered to continue onto college, and their four year high school graduate education is all the education they will ever get for the rest of their lives. It really does kind of make me feel proud of myself, just knowing that I’m going that extra step. Who cares what college degree I get, and what I use it for, it’s just the idea of getting more of an education after you graduate that will really help you in the long run.

     There definitely were certain teachers in high school that really made me want to go to college. Going to college is something that is almost expected in today’s society, and it really kind of bothers me. It really just irritates me that all of a sudden, there is this rush to get everyone educated, and off to college. Our economy is really lacking a middle class. I know a lot of people don’t like hearing this, but our economy needs more laborers, more people that can work with their hands. We need more people who are willing to take a lower pay, and do all of the dirty work.  Unfortunately, there is no American that is willing to take a lower pay to do more work, and it makes complete sense.

     The two teachers I am going to talk about in this essay really changed the way I think about education. A “good” teacher in my opinion must really have a passion for what they are teaching. They must have good relationships with the students and the teacher must have a fair grading system. I think what most teachers fail to understand is that student’s have a life outside of school. When teachers take the life of the student into consideration it really helps form good relationships with the students. Of course in order to be successful in any class you need to work hard, but it makes it much easier if the teachers are cooperative and work with you when you really need it

     The first teacher I want to talk about is Mr. Rittman, my sophomore geometry teacher, and my senior algebra 3 teacher at O’Dea high school. I think the reason Mr. Rittman was my favorite is because he genuinely knew how to teach math. He would assign homework each night, and have a quiz at the end of each week, so I really had to work pretty hard in his classes to get a good grade. If you were ever having any trouble in his class, he would be there every single day after school to help you with whatever you needed. When I was taking Algebra 3 my senior year, I found myself using this service a lot, and then taking the later ferry home from Seattle. Honestly, I think Mr. Rittman was the reason I did as well as I did in math. All I needed was a little support and encouragement to be successful

      The thing about his class is he didn’t make it seem like it was hard at all. All of a sudden, when Mr. Rittman worked a problem out on the board, it all made sense to us. He just had a way of keeping us involved and making us work out the problems on our own. Everyday when I went to class I would always have a good laugh, and I think that is the main thing I enjoyed about that class. Mr. Rittman made something as boring as math into something fun and enjoyable. One of the main things I liked about him as a teacher, is he would use funny, sometime inappropriate examples to explain math, and it kept all of us involved in his class.  When we would be talking to loudly he would sit on his stool in the front of the room, and make the weirdest faces you’ve ever seen in your life. This wasn’t only to make us laugh; it was also to get our full attention. Since I’ve had Mr. Rittman for a teacher, I know math class doesn’t always have to be boring.

     The second teacher I am going to talk about is my senior year government teacher, Mr. Zeigenfuss. Mr. Zeigenfuss had been my history teacher my freshman year of high school, and back then I thought he was a really cool guy. As you can tell, my opinions have obviously changed over the years. Government is one of those classes you can really do a lot with and make really interesting, but he didn’t bother doing anything. Most of the time, he would hand out the worksheet of the day, explain it, and then we were pretty much on our own from there. I think the reason he bothered me so much is because he acted like he worked so hard. Sure, he was a football coach at my school, but it seemed like he would put all of his energy into that, and nothing more. 

    Mr. Zeigenfuss would have us work in groups sometimes, but it was always mostly with the same people all year.  It just really seemed like the whole four years I was there, he didn’t do much of anything besides attempt to teach history, coach football, and pick on the kids that didn’t play football. He was never there after school if you needed help, he couldn’t really answer any questions we had because we knew the material about as well as he did. Honestly, I can’t say I learned anything about government in that class.  Mr. Zeigenfuss had this way of seeming like he was organized. He would line all of the desks up in perfectly straight lines, make us tuck all of our shirts in, and position the blinds so they were perfectly level with each other. In other words, major obsessive-compulsive disorder.  Mr. Z was the type of teacher to stand up there and make whatever he was talking about as dry and boring as possible, and then let us know every little thing we were doing wrong. As you can tell, I wasn’t his biggest fan.

     Over the years I have experienced the teaching styles of many different educators throughout grade school, high school, and college. When I got into Mr. Rittman’s class as a sophomore, I knew that his teaching style would work well for me. He laid everything out and set the ground rules on day one, and that’s something I really liked. He wasn’t ever disorganized or second-guessing himself, he had a lot of confidence when he stood up there and taught us. Mr. Zeigenfuss on the other hand had a major attitude, and didn’t really teach us much of anything. He was young, inexperienced and lazy to say the least. Thankfully, nowadays he is the newest gym teacher at O’Dea high school and they don’t have him teaching anything else.  By having both very good and very bad teachers over the years, I have standards. Although I usually don’t have a choice when it comes to whom I get as a teacher, I usually see what other people have to say about the teacher before I sign up for the class. I usually like to decide for myself whether or not I enjoy the teacher, but asking another student before you waste whole semester is definitely worth it.