Collaboration

I keep thinking about a girl I went to high school with who had Down's Syndrome.  We'll call her Kelly for the sake of anonymity.  Kelly was in a lot of my classes, and she had an aid that came to every class with her.  However, she was never actually part of any class.  Teachers never called on her.  She didn't take the tests or quizzes.  When we split into groups, Kelly and her aid always qualified as a whole group.

What was the point of having Kelly in the class?  If the teachers and her aid felt that the material was too hard for her, they should have had her somewhere else learning skills that should would actually be able to use.  If they felt that the material was within her comprehension, they should have worked to engage her more.

I can think of numerous other experiences where I encountered behaviors that, frankly, had students wasting their time in classrooms.  There are so many cases where teachers give up on students who do not work hard.  The students would sit in class with their heads on the desk, and sleep until the bell rang.  However, they would go to auto-shop class, and they could practically teach the class.  What was the point of forcing these students to sit through a Calculus class when they were clearly so enamored with and passionate about auto?

I have this very deep belief that the most important aspect of education is collaboration.  I'm sure you have all heard me say this before.  I have been thinking a lot about where this conviction came from.  I'm starting to think I created this idea based on what I have NOT seen in my educational experience. 

Our educational system is aimed at students who intend to go to college.  However, not everybody wants to go to college.  And that's okay.  There are a million ways to contribute, to make money, to be happy, to be intelligent, without going to college.  We need to find a way to accommodate students with a diverse set of goals.

For me, collaboration is the answer to a problem.  Throughout this class, I have formed a very strong opinion that the reason the educational system fails in so many places is that it was not created to accommodate everyone.  When I talk about collaboration in education, it is not limited to a classroom.  I mean there should be collaboration across districts, states, etc...  If we worked together to implement a variety of programs, we may be able to create an educational system everyone benefits from. 

"You don't want to go to college? Okay, what do you want to do?  You want to be a mechanic?  Mayfield had a great vocational program for you! Let's get you signed up!"  All of the sudden, a student who was once wasting his time sleeping in classes is now learning life skills he or she will be able to use passionately.  This, however, will not happen until we work together to discover what students want to learn and how we can make that happen.

As long as we have students in classrooms who are not engaging or collaborating, we have students who are in the wrong place.  We have students who are wasting their time.  We have students who would benefit from learning something else that they believe to be pertinent to their lives.

The Browns and My Education

Yesterday, I started thinking about the teachers that I would want to include on my timeline.  A few came to mind, but one stands out in particular; Kerry Rutigliano. 

I took her English class sophomore year, and I spent every waking moment fearing what my grade would be.  Everybody talked about this class as though it were a "walking on hot coals" class.  Every time she gave us a new assignment, I would get butterflies in my stomach, and I was absolutely sure I was going to fail.  By the end of the assignment, I would think to myself oh, that wasn't so bad.  And on this cycle went throughout the whole year.

By the end of sophomore year, I realized she taught me something much more valuable than the themes present in Orwell's Animal Farm or the character evaluation of Atticus Finch.  She taught me that I am capable of so much more than what I give myself credit for.  If I settle for doing only things that I already know I am good at, I will never get better at anything.

So then, I started thinking about what could have influenced her to want to push her students the way she did.  Kerry Rutigliano is the daughter of Sam Rutigliano, 1978-1984 Cleveland Browns coach.  He is known for instituting the "Inner Circle," which helped about a dozen of his players overcome drug addiction.  He wrote a book called "Presure," in which he explains how everyone is able to handle the pressures in their lives.

Clearly, Kerry Rutigliano came from a family that has a deep understanding of facing pressures, overcoming them, and growing from the experience.  This is very clear in her classroom, and I believe this idea has had an immense impact on my educational career.

Libertarian Me

I have been thinking a lot lately about how my political views affect my educational perspective.  I consider myself to be something of a Libertarian.  My social views tend to be liberal, while my fiscal views tend to be very conservative. 

It's hard for me to find a happy medium as it pertains to education.  The socially liberal side of me thinks everyone should have equal opportunity when it comes to education.  The idea that many students receive sub-par education because of where they were born just does not seem right.

The fiscal conservative in me says, "who's going to pay for it?"  We want to improve the educational system while simultaneously trying to find some sense of equality.  We have discussed that improved education involves more mindfulness than absolute knowing.  It involves a more noble goal than economic prosperity in the community.  This is going to get expensive.  And who is going to pay for it?  If we try to grow schools, while possibly decreasing the economic goal, who is going to be willing to pay?  I personally would not feel comfortable with my tax dollars going into a school system that employs any goal other than economic growth.

This class has allowed me to explore many ideas I did not spend much time thinking about.  I find myself more confused than ever, but excited to see how I will work this out within myself.

Girls = Evil

We've been having a lot of discussions in class about all the flaws in a learning environment that employs the idea of absolute knowing.  I completely understand and agree with the concept that mindfulness is a much richer knowledge than absolute knowing, but I think we need to give absolute knowing a little more credit.  The major criticism of absolute knowing lies in the idea that students are not actively engaged in their education.  They are simply memorizing concepts and moving on.  We want students to get creative, and to look beyond the idea that there are right and wrong answers.

My problem is that I do not understand how one could be expected to think outside the box and apply what we learn in school to our everyday experiences without some level of absolute knowing.  I am a very mathematical thinker.  In the foundations of Math, there actually is a right and wrong answer.  No matter how you shake it, 2 + 2 = 4.  In more complex Math theories, there actually is a great deal of creativity involved, but you have to understand the basics first.  The basics depend on absolute knowing.

Here's my example.  I'm sure many of you have seen this on the internet, but I am going to break it down to make a point:

• According to some men, the amount of money they spend is directly proportional to how much time they spent with their girlfriends.  Mathematically,

• According to Benjamin Franklin, time is money.  Mathematically,

• By way of The Transitive Property of Equality...

• The product of an integer and itself is that integer squared.  Therefore,

• According to the New Testament, money is the root of all evil.  Mathematically,

• We learned in algebra class that if you square one side of an equation, you must also square the other side of the equation. 

• The square of a square root of a number is that number...

• So we use the Transitive Property of Equality again to determine...

Obviously, this proof is just for fun.  Whoever thought of this did not make any sort of Mathematical breakthrough, but I used the equation to prove a point.  Before the author of this proof was able to display his creativity, he had to know a Benjamin Franklin quote, The Transitive Property of Equality, roots, powers, and a bible verse.  Absolute knowledge was the precursor to his creativity.

I am not saying we should abandon the idea of instilling mindfulness in our students.  What I am saying is that we should abandon the idea that absolute knowledge is somehow bad.  The ideal situation would be to combine the two.

In thinking about my educational experience, I believe I have effectively combined the two over the course of my 22 years.  In elementary school and middle school, I did schoolwork and studied because that was what people told me to do.  I unwittingly was engaged in the purest form of absolute knowledge.  My teacher told me 2 + 2 = 4.  She made a pile of 2 M&M's, added another 2, and then there were 4 M&M's.  That was it.

For me, high school was all about absolute knowledge as well.  I was not a particularly engaged student, but I did what I had to do to get good grades and go to college.  That was, memorize equations, definitions, story lines, laws, whatever it took.  But it was always about memorization, nothing more.

College was a place where I finally had the opportunity to apply what I knew to topics I was actually interested in.  There were still many instances of absolute knowledge, but they were the basis for mindfulness.  By my senior year, I had a very strong concept of the fact that I could link something I learned in tenth grade to a cocnept discussed in my freshman english class to my senior capstone project and ultimately to my own life.  My mindfulness began to exemplify itself in college, but I truly believe I needed a strong basis of absolute knowledge for this to occur.

Now I am in graduate school.  Absolute knowledge is at a minimum.  There are still some facts I just need to memorize, but for the most part this has been an exploration of what I already know, and how I am going to use it to be an effective educator.

I wonder how my educational career would have been different had I been more mindful in high school.  The transition into college certainly would have been a little smoother because I would have been more comfortable with this sort of thinking.  I don't think the strong presence of absolute knowledge in my education hurt me.  I am proud of how far I've come.  With that said, I think my education and my life as a whole would have been improved had I practiced mindfulness earlier in life.

I think we should stop comparing mindfulness vs. absolute knowledge.  We should explore how we, as educators, will find a way to make them work together harmoniously.

Wikipedia

In talking with my group about Ideological Management, I began to brainstorm about how this relates to the idea of Absolute Knowledge.  Spring addresses the notion that a major function of schools was to control things like politics, language, and religion or in short, ideleological management.  They attempted to achieve this by way of a strict educational environment where there was no room for different opinions or interpretations.  In short, schools were places where absolute knowledge was really the only accepted form of knowledge.

While we would like to believe that we have moved away from this concept, there are certain boundaries in present classrooms that lead me to believe we have not.  There is still a very strong notion of responses that are either right or wrong.  In our group discussion, I brought up Wikipedia as an example of this.  Students are told time and time again that Wikipedia is not an acceptable resource for research because some of the information presented might be wrong.  The reason that this information may be wrong is that anybody can post to Wikipedia.

What most teachers view as a flaw in Wikipedia, I view as a major strength.  The fact that anybody can post to Wikipedia makes it an instrumental resource for finding other perspectives.  If we abandon the idea that every question has a right and wrong answer, we should encourage our students to look for other ideas.

We dicussed how in the past of American Education, history books only taught about slavery from the perspective of the white man.  Is it really possible to understand what was going on if we only look at one side of the equation?  There was probably very little mentioned about the adversity faced by slaves in their every day lives; beatings, lack of medical attention, children being separated from their families, unsanitary conditions, etc...  Now, imagine Wikipedia had existed in the 50s, 60s and 70s.  It very likely would have been a resource where one would have been able to find information about the other side of the story.  Information that was different from what the textbooks said but not wrong.  Information that is very valuable to understanding slavery in America.

With that said, I kind of understand the argument against the use of Wikipedia.  The fact that anyone can post lends the issue of pulished information that is completely false.  I could go to the Wikipedia page about The Sky right now and write, "the sky is bright purple," if I wanted to.  This would not be another prospective.  This would be a lie.

So, is it right for us to have our students completely avoid a resource that could be so full of unique perspectives because we are scared they are going to find a lie? I don't think so.  I think it is part of our jobs as educators to teach our students to be critical thinkers.  If they find a piece of information on Wikipedia that seems different from what they learned in the past, they could react in a couple ways:

• First, they might take that information as fact, and cite Wikipedia in their work.
• We do not want them to engage in this sort of learning where they believe something just because it is published on a website.
• Second, they could assume it is wrong because they never learned it in school.
• We also want to stray from this sort of thinking where teachers and textbooks are the be all, end all of our students' knowledge.
• The third, and best, option would be to research the topic further.

A quick google search will likely bring up numerous pages about the claim.  If we teach our students effective critical thinking skills, they should be able to formulate intelligent opinions based on what they find.  If their google search brings up articles from credible magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, they may be able to deduce that the information they found on Wikipedia actually has some substance.  However, if their google search only finds blog of conspiracy theorists (just for example), they should be able to write that information off as nonsensical. 

As a sidenote, I think the use of Wikipedia in schools would actually benefit students.  When they have teachers available to guide them in deciding what is credible and what is not, their critical thinking skills will be greatly improved.

I really wish we would move away from the idea that Wikipedia should not be used.  If we instead claim it should be used carefully, I think our students would have a solid resource full of unique perspectives on almost every topic.  In the event they find and consequently believe a false piece of information, an educator will be there to guide them in understanding ways to recognize uncredible sources in the future.  No harm, no foul.  Forbidding the use of Wikipedia, in my opinion, is restricting our students' knowledge.

Introductory

About Me

My name is Christine DeCapite (but you can call me Chrissy).  I am from Gates Mills, Ohio, and I currently live in Downtown Cleveland.  You can e-mail me at christine.decapite@gmail.com.  My Bachelor's Degree is from Miami University where I majored in Decision Sciences.  I am working toward getting my initial licensure and M.Ed. to teach AYA Mathematics.  I love to read, travel, cook, and manage my food blog, Sorelle è Cibo.


My Learning Style

I am most comfortable in very structured learning environments.  It is very important for me to have a specific schedule of assignments and gradebook.  Nothing gives me more anxiety than a disorganized teacher or professor.  My assignments are always turned in either on time or early.  I have a tendency to be very hard on myself which usually results in quality work.

When I don't understand something, I like to try to figure it out myself.  When I figure something out on my own, I am much more likely to really grasp AND remember that concept.  I will look first to the textbook then google.  If I still cannot grasp a particular concept, I will then turn to my peers and professors.


Education Past and Present

My Calculus teacher senior year has made the biggest impact on me as a student and a professional.  Before I took this class, I really struggled in Math.  After taking his class, I realized that Math was not the problem.  I was.  Teachers who can instill a strong work ethic in their students will find the most success in their careers.  Thanks to Mr. Nidy, I learned that I actually love Math because I find it very rewarding when I grasp a really tough concept.

I think one of the greatest issues in the current educational environment is student apathy.  With that said, I think student apathy is a product of teacher apathy.  So many teachers just want to get through the year, and complete everything required of them.  If more educators were willing to go above and beyond to create lesson plans that really engage students, our educational system would be greatly improved.

For this particular course, my ideal classroom would include a lot of online collaboration bolstered by in-class discussions.  We would explore and share our ideas about the most effective way to engage students in subjects that they may not even enjoy learning about.  The most important thing is that we work as a team.  While I find compeition to be healthy in many contexts, I do not think there is a very big place for it in a classroom.