The Blue Blog

I think that, in his article about conflicting goals in our educational system, David Labaree does a good job in describing the historical and social forces that are pushing and pulling at our school systems.  Going on personal experience, I think that I have seen democratic equality and social efficiency play a part in what [...]

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The first thing that struck me as interesting about the work of Nicholas Burbules and Rupert Burk on critical thinking and critical pedagogy is that I never had a teacher at the elementary or secondary school level who practiced critical pedagogy.  Perhaps this is not an uncommon experience, but I thought it interesting because the [...]

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Thinking about education at the levels discussed in this article is something completely new in my own schema about what it means to be an educator.  Since there was a lot of information covered and most of it is new to me, I would like to approach the material on educational philosophies by arguing which [...]

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Before reading Linda M. McNeil’s writing on the relationship between knowledge control and classroom control, I never would have thought that the two classroom issues could be so interrelated.  However, I think she makes a very good argument for the substitution of more challenging course content with simpler lessons as means of keeping order in [...]

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I was personally very thankful for the topic of this week’s reading because classroom management is one of the things I have always felt very nervous about. I found it very true to life that the authors included a brief mention of the fact that many teachers, at the beginning of their first classroom [...]

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Overall, Brophy’s ideas for helping discouraged students are focused on individualizing teaching strategies for effective coping through modeling and classroom practices.  My first thoughts when I read some of his suggestions were about the more difficult nature of putting some of those suggestions into practice in a secondary school setting, where each student has several [...]

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Motivation has been a topic in education that has always left me at a loss for words.  I always thought that there was no real way to “motivate” students in a classroom setting, but that as a teacher one must hope that students will want to get something out of the material.  I have therefore [...]

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            After reading the first few statistics-ridden pages of thie article on adult literacy, I can already feel a familiar objection to the report surfacing.  After all of the data is collected, the figures are added up, and the margin of error calculated, I think that studies such as this do not serve any actual [...]

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Within two chapters, Lankshear and Knobel quickly present many different ideas about literacy, but there are a few that I think are the most important in terms of the changing world we live in.  In the first chapter, the idea of “multiliteracies” is explored, and I was impressed with the focus given on literacy needed [...]

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As a student of social studies, English, and occasionally Spanish as well, I have come to realize that nothing that can be taught is confined to one area of study.  Geography, history, cultural studies, economics, politics, and literature written in any language all overlap in content, and subject matter from all disciplines can be used [...]

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