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.

Discussion on Gatto

Gatto's point is that every public school student is receiving a cookie-cutter education to shape them into average citizens. My group members and I agree with his point because we have had these kinds of parameters posed on ourselves when enrolled in public school systems.

• "Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children." 
• "The aim.. . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality." 
• "By the time I finally retired in 1991, I had more than enough reason to think of our schools - with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers - as virtual factories of childishness." 
• "Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: 'We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.'"

Reviewing "Zami" by Audre Lorde

“Zami” was a very interesting piece to read. Audre Lorde really had a hard time in school because of her vision, and her inability to remember the order of numbers. This essay really puts you in Audre’s shoes and illustrates what kind of education she had. One scene that stuck out to me is when her teacher was telling her to simply draw the first letter of her name of the paper. Audre, always out to impress wrote her full name out on the paper. The teacher came over to her desk and exclaimed “Well I never!” Her voice was sharp. “I thought I told you to draw this letter? You don’t even what to try and do as you are told. Now I want you to turn that page over and draw your letter like everyone…” and turning to the next page, she saw my second name sprawled down across the page.  I think that this clearly illustrates the scene exactly how it happened, and the type of teaching style that this grade school teacher uses. Audre is trying to impress her teacher, but the teacher is so strict about following directions, she doesn’t recognizes Audre’s creativity.