HW 50- Notes on Finishing Our School Unit.

The only text that truly interests me is the text written by John Taylor Gatto on "How

public education cripples our kids, and why". Even before i read this text as i read the title I

was immediately interested to hear what this author had to say about how the public cripples

our students in todays education system and his reasoning behind it. So as I started to read

the the text what i noticed was his first argument, an example of this is: "Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?" -Gatto.

I thought that this part of the text really had some kick to it because in my opinion you would never ever hear or see an any adult or author talk about the how teachers are obviously bored while teaching students. As well I'm surprised that Gatto connects these teachers to the same level of boredom that our students of today are experiencing now a days in our so called "compulsory" schooling system. I'll tell Gatto that the whole reason about why we are trapped in this flawed system of schooling that causes mass boredom amongst teachers and students. The reason is us, and i agree with Gatto when he says this in the second paragraph of his text because its my reason one the topic as well. If we make use of our teachers and I'm not saying we don't but what I mean is to actually sit them down and talk to them about the curriculum that they should teach us. What is taught in school should consist of what is interesting to the students on and individual level, this so called "working process" of schooling doesn't give any chance for our students today to actually be interested in school. What it does is make our students exactly feel a way that nobody should ever feel when they are in the process of educating them selves and being educated by others, and the same should go for the teachers in todays schools. Until we can find a way to accomplish this we will continue to lack the true learning abilities of education and we will forever be attempting to learn in a failing system.

Another part of Gatto's text that intrigued me was when he talked about the actually needing an education in the first place. To be specific what made me think this was the text here: "Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated." -Gatto. Now first off what really got me was when he said that there's 2 million happy home schooled students which i think he's talking about are in the US. This surprised me very much because I didn't know that so many students chose to be home schooled instead going to public or private school. As well another thing that caught my attention is a fact that i didn't realize, that our fore fathers like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln didn't go to school at all. I really could not believe that I didn't realize this and use it in a conversation as an argument, but now that I actually have been informed about this controversial information I plan to use this as evidence in future arguments and maybe in future papers. I mean just look at them they became the founders of our Nation the United States of America and then just look how we turn out 234 years later to be teaching our our students in a failing education system obviously they had it down packed back then in the years right before and after 1776. Also another thing that kinda made me feel a little inadequate was when Gatto talked about Ariel Durant whom co-wrote "The Story of Civilization" and was in a happy marriage at the age of 15. This make me feel unequivocally out classes by this young woman at such a young age being so morally and mentally secure. It just shocks me that when she was this young and she was at such a level of prestige that early in life i feel like I'm doing something wrong in my life currently.

This leads me into another example which i would like to share my feeling about. Later in Gatto's text he write about the how the structure of our schooling system today came to be and I always pondered on this fact especially when Andy gave on of his many interesting classes and he taught us that our schooling system started to come into affect during the nineteenth century. As well he said that we adopted it from the education system of the east side of germany during its occupation by the former United Soviet Social Republic when it was being used as soviet satellite state but he didn't really elaborate enough on the specific details as much as I wanted him to. But besides the fact the part of the text where these thought came into my head was: "Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best." -Gatto I was also as you should think not too surprised but interested in what Gatto had to say here because I thought that we adopted our type of schooling during the years after World War Two,(1945 and so on) but now I understand that we adopted in between the years of 1905 and 1915 and were constantly elaborating on the process and attempting to make it work better. But i understand now and I'm sure that many other people feel the same way as me that it was a change for the worst because our system is failing and not giving our students what they really need to succeed and better themselves through their own personal interest. And as soon as our society can comprehend the fact that this should be our top priority, our schooling system will continue to breed uninterested, compassionless students with on drive or want to actually learn what they truly want to learn.

HW 49-Notes on Finishing Our School Unit.

Well what my personal contribution to the class film was being a "class goon". What i basically took part in was being a member of a certain group of kids that you see in every high school, the punks. These kids who are pretty much just plain out disrespectful don't get their work done and don't care what the teachers tells them to do or say, they just think they know it all,they think their too cool for school. Well so I played one of these kids and I feel I played it pretty well in the film our class made. When we were shooting the team of goons was Evan, Omar, Quinn, and me who were causing trouble in the class room in the two scenes. When Will who was playing the main character Mr. C the alcoholic teacher who lost his wife was attempting to teach the class this was when we would act up and cause problems in the classroom. But this would be halted for a brief minute every time when he would actually stop teaching and try to bring some realization into our lives. He would do this by talking about the way we use electronic devices to constantly stay in touch with our friends and for numerous other things. He would try to make us realize what would happen to us in our lives if we would continue to do what we do in school now by scaring us by basically depicting a prediction our futures to be the lives of criminals, low lives, who are most likely to end up in jail. What i believe is the message of our film is that what you do in your school life is going to reflect on your future of what you do in life, its gunna mold you into what you will become in the future.

This film partly has connections to all of our past Savior Teacher films that we watched. For instance one aspect that our film had was that during the film was the classic trope of the classroom full of the disruptive out of control students whom don't seem to care or even acknowledge the teacher when he or she is trying to acquire the classes attention. As seen in pretty much every movie clip we watched for instance Black Board Jungle, Dead Poets Society, Freedom Writers, etc... But although our film connected to these other Savior films that I have said what I fell that it didn't connect to was the extent of the extremely troubled teacher like Mr. C in our film who was a drunk and had both relationship and family problems. In spite of this connection I believe that salvation can only be found in teaching and schooling if the teacher or student truly wants to open up their mind and learn and/or teach what they honestly want to. But sadly I have to say that this is hardly possible with the schooling and teaching system that we have currently in our lives, it's based too much on what the Board of Education wants to dictate to us and what they think that we need to know to be successful in our lives. As well the society in our time is too dead bent on the straight schooling agenda that the Board of Education has in place to us which is the reason we can never have a chance to accomplish an actual true and honest learning experience that interests us. Until our society stops depending our basic marshal law of schooling that the government has for us we will not be able to change our system to further better our ways of truly learning what we are honestly interested in.

HW 47-Class Film Preparation 1.

I would rather not compose 5 to 10 ideas because i have a great idea in which i would like to elaborate on here a little. Ok, my idea as I said in class two weeks ago before break is to have a story base around a teacher that in a way has personal problems in his life that effect his ability to do his job as a teacher. And as the result of this the teacher is an alcoholic and this affects his influence on his class of high school students that he teaches. But as he's going through his problems he is in such a constant depressing state that his students actually start to notice his depression in his life and try to make him feel better by sharing their own problems in their lives. As they are doing this they persuade him share his own problems and in the end of the film I decided to make then confide in each other, the problem ridden teacher and his class of troubled students and they both actually figure out solutions to their own problems and sit down and start a normal class together. I don't know why i decided to use the classic troupe, but it seemed good at the moment when i thought of the idea and wrote it out on paper.

-Brendan S.