"Mind the Gap" Session 2

1.     After reading chapter one of Ravitch’s book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, several quotes stood out to me.  The first one came from the very first page of the chapter when she says, “Where I once had been hopeful, even enthusiastic, about the potential benefits of testing, accountability, choice, and markets, I now found myself experiencing profound doubts about these same ideas” (1).  This quote stood out to me for a number of reasons.  First of all, I think this is a sentiment to which most of us can relate: we have all been hopeful about something’s possibilities, only to find out that its potential benefits could not make up for its shortcomings.  For me, that has happened both in academia as well as in everyday life.  Clearly, that was the case for NCLB.  I also believe this quote makes an important statement: it’s okay to be hopeful about something, but it’s absolutely crucial to unpack its strengths and weaknesses before deciding on whether or not it should be implemented.  Implementing anything without such a weighing of the pros and cons can lead to careless and unnecessary mistakes.  The second quote I chose is Ravitch’s response to John Maynard Keynes’ comment about changing his mind when the facts change: “It is the mark of a sentient human being to learn from experience, to pay close attention to how theories work out when put into practice” (2).  I think this is a very important point, just in general: we have to be cognizant of our decisions and choices in life.  Sure, we make one-time decisions all the time.  However, the really critical decisions, the ones that define us, are the ones we need to constantly think about and reevaluate: do I still believe this?  Does this still make sense for me?  Are there new facts and/or factors that change things for me?  We have to react to, learn from, and evolve through our experiences.  Otherwise, what’s the point of having them?

2.     Ravitch says that a well-educated person “has a well-furnished mind, shaped by reading and thinking about history, science, literature, the arts, and politics.  The well-educated person has learned how to explain ideas and listen respectfully to others” (16).  I agree and disagree with her definition.  I agree with the first half, in that I believe a well-educated person is one who studies materials from a wide array of disciplines.  To be well-educated, one must have a thirst for knowledge that extends beyond the constrictions of such labels.  This kind of person is not after knowledge in one particular area, but rather is in search of universal truths and connections.  However, I do not agree with the second sentence of her definition in its entirety.  While I do believe that listening is an important skill to learning, I do not necessarily concur that a well-educated person has to be able to explain ideas.  That is the skill of a teacher, not of just any scholar.  A person can be smart and well-educated without being able to effectively share their knowledge.  I’ve seen that many times with ineffective teachers and professors: they are well-educated and know a lot about a lot, but they do not possess the ability to express that with the world at large.

My family and me at my UC Davis graduation ceremony.

3.     After the class discussion on the book, it seemed I was on the same page as a lot of my peers.  We seemed to all have understood Ravitch’s words and the theme of her message in these initial chapters.  So, the same things that stood out to me while reading chapters one and two on my own were the same things that stood out to me during discussion.  The two quotes mentioned above in question one are points I found very important for the reasons I described.  To make a more general statement, what stood out to me was her honesty, not just in terms of her opinion on the way we test students, but also in terms of her own beliefs.  She did not try to conceal or lessen her own mistakes in thought, but rather wrote about them in detail to better support her current ideas on the matter.  To me, that added some validity to her position because she was more able to explain why the facts made her change her mind.  There was nothing I really wanted to say and didn’t during our discussion, but I suppose one thing I wish I had brought up earlier to increase the amount of discussion around the issue was the matter of the time period in which things like ANAR and NCLB were each written.  I mentioned at the very end of the discussion that I thought it was very easy for us to see now that something like NCLB was a bad idea.  However, we have to take into consideration what else was happening in American culture during the same time period.  Hindsight is always 20/20, but the vision of the present moment and what its effects will be on the future is nowhere near as clear.  I wish I had brought this up earlier in the discussion, so that I could hear the thoughts of my peers, which has already proven to be so helpful over these last couple of weeks.

4.     After jotting down my own gaps in knowledge within my subject area (based upon the California state framework for grades nine through ten), I found myself with a rather long list.  One that stood out to me was Writing standard 2.5, which is about writing business letters.  I was surprised that this was an English standard.  Although I understand why it would be put in English, I have not worked with one English teacher who teaches this material.  I chose this standard as the gap I would focus on for this blog entry because I felt like it was one of my larger gaps.  Most of the other standards I included on my list were areas where I felt like I needed improvement, but that I at least had a little knowledge about; I had no idea where to even begin writing a business letter, let alone where to begin teaching such a skill.  To better my understanding of this gap, I found three resources to help me.  The first was an article from the Chicago Tribune entitled “How to Write a Business Letter” by Bill Daley.  The second resource was the book Barron’s How To Write Better Business Letters by Andrea B. Geffner.  While there were several books on the subject, this was the one that kept the most consistently high rating scores from readers.  The third and final source (and the one I will explain in more detail) was a website activity from readwritethink.org with the heading “Letter Generator”.  This site is great.  It is an interactive webpage where you simply input the important information by following the prompts on the page and answering them in the provided text boxes.  After following the steps, the program creates the letter in the proper format for you.  The website does give some guiding help about what kind of information to include in the body of the letter, but it is very general.  If I were to teach this standard, I would use the article or book mentioned above as the main tools for learning what such a letter should actually include, but I would use the website to teach formatting.

If you would like to check out the letter generator website, here is the link.

5.     Through my research for my project [please see previous entries for more information about my research topic and my guiding questions], I have started compiling quite the list of sources.  The first source is called The Latino Achievement Gap by A. Michael Madrid.  This article focused mostly on how Latino students are treated in school, in terms of the facilities and the teachers.  This article was very qualitative, in that it used previously existing statistics and teacher focus groups.  Most of the information in this article didn't surprise me (things like Latino students are often found in schools with lesser amenities and facilities, Latino students come with a wide range of English language skills, making it difficult to create a lesson plan for them as a group, etc), but this article gave specific facts and figures that I found really helpful.  A lot of the research they mentioned sounded really interesting to me, so I will absolutely be looking through the list of sources for more articles.  This author seemed to know a lot about the subject of the research, but I think the research itself about teacher beliefs about Latino students was not super strong.  The findings were intriguing (they showed how a large part of the problem for Latino student learning is low expectations and investment by their teachers), but they were from teachers only in high Latino-populated schools.  I would want to know about how teachers with more of a mixed population would feel; would they assume a higher learning potential?  Lesser learning potential?  This article was a good start, but it will not be the crux of my research.  The second is Brain-behavior relationship in reading acquisition are modulated by socioeconomic factors by Kimberly G. Noble, et al.  The research studied how SES could actually affect brain behavior.  The study looked at areas of the brain that were related to phonological language skills and found that a higher SES could actually help make up for lesser brain-behavior in these areas, while a lower SES meant no “extra help” in these areas.  In other words, having a higher SES actually meant higher performance with lower brain functioning.  This information was incredibly profound to me: factors like our parental education, occupation, and income can make us perform better, even with lesser cognitive functioning.  This research made me wonder if there are other such areas of the brain affected by SES, other than those related to phonological language skills.  If there are, then that could greatly influence the kinds of teaching methods that could help bridge the achievement gap.  This author seemed credible, given her large list of sources, her solid research methods, and her description of the subjects.  I plan on using her list of sources to further my own research.

6.     And now a question for you, Joan: my current focus question is what methods best narrow the achievement gaps among students from different socioeconomic classes?  I have been thinking about this not only in terms of income, parent education, etc (factors that fall into the definition of socioeconomic status), but also in terms of race and ethnicity (factors that are not normally considered as a part of SES).  I want to continue to look at both, but is this too wide of a topic for my project?  If I did choose to continue looking into SES and race/ethnicity, would it be better if I looked at only one group?  Please let me know what you think.  Thank you in advance!

I responded to the following blogs:
http://jocelynrohan.blogspot.com/
http://misshollison.blogspot.com/
http://missasch.blogspot.com/