5) In these chapters, Kozol brings awareness to the dirtiness and the lack of consistency within the school system at the time of his visits. He points out later on that while the “outside” has changed for the better, the internal problems in the school still linger. The part that got me the most was when I child said that they saw new teachers everyday. If I have learned one key thing in my student teaching, it is that we are supposed to be that constancy for the students. Kozol tells of his experiences so we can know the validity of what was and still is going on.
4)
“Everything in my school is so so dirty… Many thing have changed in inner-city schools since then; and some remain the same. Physical disrepair and squalor may not be as blatant in most districts now, although there are schools I visit where conditions are a good deal more offensive that the ones my students fully described… I see new teachers omots every day” (Kozol, 162).
“There is no misery index for the children of apartheid education… you have to do what children do and breathe the air the children breathe. I don’t think that there is any other way to find out what the lives that children lead in school are real like” (Kozol, 163).
“The hard edge of the standards-driven juggernaut did not seem to have made more than minor inroads on instructional approaches in this building’ and despite the fact that testing pressures were increasing for the teachers at the Russell at the time that I was there, it had not lost that fragile sense of unprotected and unglazed humanity in grownups and endearing randomness in children that is often very hard to find in other urban schools today” (Kozol, 169).
“Our parents do not know what the best is, but they want the best. When we have to assign their kids to summer semesters and to portables while three miles down the road they can see schools with traditional calendars and with sufficient space, I can understand it when they ask, why are our children not important?” (Kozol, 171).
3)
Squalor (161): a state of being extremely dirty and unpleasant, esp. as a result of poverty or neglect
Juggernaut (169): he form of Krishna worshiped in Puri, Orissa, where in the annual festival his image is dragged through the streets on a heavy chariot; devotees are said formerly to have thrown themselves under its wheels. Also called Jagannatha .
Asbestos (172): a heat-resistant fibrous silicate mineral that can be woven into fabrics, and is used in fire-resistant and insulating materials such as brake linings.
2)
I made several connections in these chapters. The first was in chapter 7 when he talks about the dirtiness within the schools and how the students described their school was heart breaking. I was in New York city this summer and when we took the subway through areas like the Bronx I would look outside and see all of the graffiti and trash that was everywhere. This specific area that we were in was near a school and to see their “Playground” was mind shattering. It did not seem fair in the least that these children were not able to even have a clean and safe place to play. Reading this passage brought me to this. The way the children describe their dirty school and the inconsistency of their teachers is heartbreaking as well. We place these high expectations on students but then don’t even give them a place to be proud of? The second part I personally connected with was when Kozol was talking about how sometimes it was more difficult to go into a high school classroom and see how much more difficult it was to get them to open up. I think this is where my fear comes in as a teacher. I have so limited myself to the younger grades because of the fear of rejection I have so quickly pinpoint to high school students. This is true but I should not reach out and care for this age out of my own fear.
1) While the cleanliness in schools has improved tremendously in so many areas, that does not mean that the problems are fixed. How can we as teachers be more in tune to the problems our students have?
It does seem odd that in the richest nation with the most well educated population that we would actually still allow an achievement, opportunity, economic gap to exist in our schools and communities. Essentially it comes down to priorities. We should ask ourselves each day "what have I done today to close the gap between the haves and have nots."
ReplyDelete