Monday, September 12, 2011

Olsen's Chapter 3

I want to discuss the discussion in the very beginning of chapter 3 in "Made in America."  The teacher asked the students, "If it were up to you, what would you learn in high school that would be useful to you?  What would you be studying?"  As a student, I have also been prompted this in a classroom.  However, the discussion in my classroom went much differently.  A factor I believe that caused a different result was that I went to a private, Catholic, college prep high school.  The discussion in Lisa Stern's world history class started right out with what is offered in terms of ethnic background in order to include certain groups that Tony, a student, felt were left out.  When I have had this question posed to my classroom, my classmates and I had responses that were more along the lines of how we wanted to learn things that we deemed as more relevant to us, or we wanted more of a variety of classes.  We didn't have home economics or pottery, we pretty much just had the basic stuff.  I don't think my experience with this discussion has ever gone as personally as this one did in the book.  My brothers, on the other hand, went to the public school near us where they were the minority; they were typically the only white students in the class.  Having heard their experiences, I believe that this prompt would have gone more similarly to Lisa Stern's class.  Noting these results and comparing them shows all the factors that contribute to a students' learning experiences in a classroom.  Where they go to school is made up of subcategories: class, race, academic successes and failures, etc.  All of these, along with many others, contribute to a student's attitude towards learning in that school.  If we were to address some of these issues, only a few, I wonder how the academic progress would change! 

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