Snowball's Chance

  FNED 546 Weekly Blog Assignment #11 – Transgender Guidance & Woke Kindergarten QUOTES The video from “Woke Kindergarten” and the straightforward text from the Rhode Island Department of Elementary and Secondary Education gave us perspective on how to work with transgender and gender nonconforming students in two very different communication styles. As befitting the series title of “Woke Kindergarten”, the video was paced slowly and clearly, with animations and breaks for viewers to consider the questions asked by the host as they reviewed the book “It Feels Good To Be Yourself: A Book About Gender Identity” by Theresa Thorn. It recaps the concepts of transgender, cisgender, binary and nonbinary identifying people. The video is clear and doesn’t dive too deeply into any one area – it’s an overview that’s easy to understand. While gender identity can be a “hot button” discussion in some places, I thought the video did a really good job of explaining different gender ide...

  QUOTES REFLECTION Caroline Miller’s overview of the Neurodiversity movement helped me understand it better, and showed hope for the future. Neurodivergent students already have an uphill battle in many ways, so it’s heartening to see school systems working to find better ways to educate and include them. Sociologist Judy Singer launched the neurodiversity movement, to “promote equality of what she called “neurological minorities” – people whose brains work in atypical ways. Singer felt that these differences should not be viewed as deficits, but rather as normal and potentially valuable variations on the way brains work.” “Proponents of neurodiversity argue that some impairments affecting kids with autism, ADHD, and learning disabilities are environment-related. These challenges can be caused by issues in the surroundings they are in. That’s why another focus of the movement is to encourage changes in environments — everything from workplaces to classrooms to kids’ birth...

 I don't have any serious "troublemakers" in my class - one kid I'll call Victor almost assuredly has pretty serious undiagnosed ADHD. He's a really nice fourth grade boy, friendly and thoughtful. His reading, writing, and spelling are below grade level. When I have worked with Victor one-on-one he will get distracted often, sometimes more than once during one sentence. I spoke with the full-time teacher and she mentioned that she has hinted and suggested to the parents that testing Victor for ADHD would be a good idea, but that a teacher can't expressly recommend that directly to a parent. The additional factor is that Victor is leaving this private Christian school (with a class of 13 kids) to enter public school in the Fall. We worry about what will happen to him as a new kid in a larger classroom.

QUOTES REFLECTION Carla Shalaby’s Troublemakers wastes no time in making its point – connecting the dots in the first couple pages: “According to the most recent data from the Department of Education, black preschoolers are 3.8 times more likely to be suspended than their white peers.” “…children who do not read proficiently by the end of third grade are four times more likely to leave high school without a diploma. Securing a job with livable wages without a high school diploma is a challenge, to put it mildly. As a result, young people sometimes find it necessary to engage in unlawful underground economies in order to survive, and then we imprison them. “This is a continuation of America’s historic legacy of injustice. In the era of slavery, teaching a black person to read was illegal because reading and writing are forms of power, tools for organizing, means to freedom. Removing young children from school, hindering their capacity to acquire such tools, inevitably relegates c...

 QUOTES REFLECTION Patrick Finn’s discussion of the American caste system and the educational separation that fuels it details his journey from drill sergeant rookie teacher to well-meaning educational revolutionary – with a drop or two of conspiracy theorist mixed in. Here’s his basic premise, leaning heavily on the findings on Jean Anyon: “My explanation of why literacy is not seen as dangerous among the working people and unemployed of the United States is that we have developed two kinds od education. First, there is empowering education, which leads to powerful literacy, the kind of literacy that leads to positions of power and authority. Second, there is domesticating education, which leads to functional literacy, literacy that makes a person productive and dependable, but not troublesome.” It’s not quite as simple as the privileged Eloi and subterranean Morlocks from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine , but Finn does subscribe to the notion that students receive basic inst...

  FNED 546 Weekly Blog Assignment #7 – What to Look For In a Classroom (Alfie Kohn) & CLASSROOM TOUR – Middle School video (Megan Forbes) REFLECTION I enjoyed reading Alfie Kohn’s “What to Look For In a Classroom” chart-icle and it heartened me to see so many of the “good signs” reflected in the third grade classroom I am currently volunteering in. The room has multiple comfortable areas for learning, including two “learning centers”, one of which is a half-pentagon table with chairs around it. There’s also a large space for gathering at the front of the classroom. Two huge bulletin boards on the walls are covered with the latest writing and art projects from the entire class. There is a well-labeled area with books available for signing out, plenty of art supplies in a closet, and a few bins of wooden blocks and connective blocks for abstract building. Beyond these things that mirror Kohn’s suggestions, the physical layout of the desks in the room is very carefully arr...