HW 50

GATTO
Gatto discussed the main steps of school: school is a sorting machine, the students must be obdeient, the teacher chooses the curriculum for the students, the student is only as good as the teacher detrmines they are, and the student is under constant surveilance. Basically, the six lessons are trying to form and mold the students to be students that are easy to teach and easy to sort into the appropriate places in society. If the student is cooperative in the classroom and treats the teacher as the authority figure who thinks for everyone, they can be easily sorted. Basically, the teacher has all the power in the classroom and the students are just there to absorb what is being taught without any individual thought or contribution.

Gatto does not agree with these steps, "This curriculum produces moral and intellectual paralysis" the steps do not allow for the teachers to actually learn anything but to accept the authoritive figure and be obedient. "Institutional schoolteachers are destructive to children's development. Nobody survives the Six-Lesson Curriculum unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly anti-educational" The steps create an inauthentic environment that is not natural for teacher or students.

FREIRE
Freire talks about the banking concept of education where learning is similar to a commodity, the teacher offers the information and the student takes it, "the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat." The student only regurgitates the information provided by the teacher rather than thinking about it, "the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits."

DELPIT:
Delpit believes that test taking does not accurately determine the intellegence of a student, "If teachers make judgments only according to the tests being inflicted on the children by the schools, then they can misunderstand their children's brilliance... these children carry a brilliance that you have little access to. You have to figure out how to bring that brilliance out." The main focus in looking at the brilliance of a student is looking at their strengths and weaknesses as a learner.

Delpit discusses that traditional way of learning (the steps) are necessary but there should be opportunities for students to be aware of how they are learning and what they are learning."I suggest that students must be taught the codes needed to participate fully in the mainstream of American life, not by being forced to attend to hollow, inane, decontextualized subskills, but rather within the context of meaningful communicative endeavors; that they must be allowed the resource of the teacher’s expert knowledge, while being helped to acknowledge their own ‘expertness’ as well" students should take what the teachers teach as information to not just memorize and spit back out but to think about it for themselves.

MS. D
She says he had a good experience at her Brown, there were no core curriculums and it was a self motivated school. She specifically wanted to teach at a public school that was anti regents test prep. Ms. D discussed how difficult it was for her to find a school where her main focus in teaching was not preparing the students for the standardized tests. She went by the phrase "breath no depth" and she had researched Ted Sizer were she had found a very specific interest in his way of teaching. She seems to be very pleased with her job at school of the future, she loves the exhibitions that we do, the freedom in the curriculum, and that the teachers are able to get to know the students.

MR. MANLEY
When asked why Mr. Manley decided to beome a teacer, he explained that teaching is a real humanistic job where you can really connect with people. He compared his experience teaching at SOF to a previous school he taught at where the teachers were not allowed to connect with the students at all. He had to teach grammar for a whole semester whereas at SOF he chose what to teach the students and he was able to have close realtionships with the students. But a negative aspect of SOF that he mentioned was that students were more motivated to hand in homeowork at the previous school he taught at.

Manley also discussed the difference between a progressive groovy style of teaching and traditional style of teaching. This lead into his experiences teaching with these two different styles of teaching. Relating to the issue of motivation, at the more traditional school, the students wwere more obdeient and did the work to get the grade whereas at SOF as a progressive style, the environment is more laidback I think especially at SOF because the majority of the students are so comfortable in the school, being there through middle school in addition to having close relationships with the teachers, students are less motivated to do the work. Manley also compares how in the traditional way of teaching, the students just get the work done where in a more progressive style, the students think about why and they have their own opinion on what they are learning.