Week '6'?? Already?

What have people said that's interesting?

“Students today are a pretty somber lot.”

-Robertson Davies

          As a very young child, before school, I always loved watching my mother homeschool my brothers. I would sit in with them and my sister and I would pretend to also learn, even though they were two grades ahead of us, therefore we understood nothing going on. Still, it excited us to be in the crowd. School was the next stage of life, and we wanted to be involved in it. The year we finally started, I was bouncing off the walls. I wrote the cursive alphabet ten times every day just to be the first to learn it. We always jumped out of bed and ran straight to our books. After a few years, though, the excitement dimmed. A lot. We would take half hour breaks after twenty minutes of working. Our imagination was severely stimulated simply because we would think of games to do with anything in the house just to get out of work. Whether it was advance hide and sick played with laser detectors or a version of Dungeons and Dragons we established ourselves, we would think up ANYTHING to do for 'quick breaks.' So it shouldn't have surprised me in high school when so many around me would rather goof off then pay an ounce of attention to the teachers. I broke out of the spell because high school was completely different for me. 'Teachers' was a new concept I was thrilled about (no offence, Mom. You were great for all eight years of it!), but I didn't think about the fact that everyone else had been through the same classroom setting forever. I mean, there are minor changes; in middle school you start getting new teachers for every subject, and in high school (I think anyway; pfft, I wouldn't know) recess goes away. Still, it's designed to be a bit mundane, isn't it? Interest level is left up to teachers to make or break, a dang it if they don't do an awesome job at it.

What's happening in education?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443768804578038191947302764.html?mod=googlenews_wsj       

          The Wallstreet Journal writers Hutchison and Mikulski have noticed that some people are arguing against a states right to give students the option of single-gender classrooms or schools, which I didn't even know was a thing, really. Apparently their argument is that these opposing parties are 'particularly troubl[ing]'  because they are trying to strip children's opportunities to work in their best fitting environment. What? Okay, I understand that some people may be sexist at an extremely young age or uncomfortable with the 'cooties' of another gender or just severely distracted by the infatuating opposite sex, but co-ed classrooms are what will fix that behavior because teachers will stop a sexist student from speaking out or force an uncomfortable student to work in a group with boys and girls or tell the flirting couple in the back to shut up and pay attention. If kids honestly have just a real problem with it, they can go to a college that hasn't jumped on the equalist bandwagon yet. All in all, that 'real' world everyone is so concerned with has *gasp* men and women in it, so they'll have to learn to manage in that environment eventually.

And what have I learned this weak?

          This week, I was given the amazing chance to skip a day of school and job shadow an art teacher else where. It can be pretty eye opening to see some place with less advantages than where I'm at, but what was most surprising was how the teachers worked hard to give their kids as best a chance as possible, given their circumstances. The teacher I shadowed had a classroom probably a fourth the size of my school's art room, but she was organized, gave lessons fine tuned to specific classes, and informed them, in depth, of everything there was to art. As I mentioned above, this really showed me that it's not about the school or the class or the fancy materials. It's the teacher that makes it all great or disastrous or, in some occasions, tremendous. Keep being amazing, Mrs. Teacher-I-Shadowed.