Barb Rentenbach reflection

Here are my stream of consciousness thoughts and reactions to Barb Rentenbach's presentation:
She types really slow. Is her mind working that slow? Or is it full of thoughts? I'm wondering how she learned to read in the first place, or even what a letter is. Lois has to stand behind her and rub her back in encouragement, almost like a child. Why is it that she keeps repeating cuss words, not just any old word?

"Autism is my prism, not my prison."

Wow. Barb's words, as read by Lois, are incredible. Barb thinks the world is better with autism. She wants to disprove the idea that autism needs the world but the world doesn't need autism. Why do I think the other way?? I assume people with autism wish they do not have it, but Barb sees advantages in autism, or even ADHD. She sees herself as closer to God than a "successful" businessman. Her writing is so clear, so professional! It appears that she has done a lot of research for this book as well. She jokes a lot with Lois.

I wonder, who edited her novel and added the commas, capital letters, and flow?

Barb: there is no standard brain. She thinks "autism is a type of neurology"--no comparisons or judgments. WE need to be careful when we medicate away ADHD. We don't know what we're missing! There are strengths with even dyslexia! Barb: "Find out who you are and be that on purpose." As a teacher, I want to find where my students excel and go from there. How can I practically do this? Where can I find the time in a classroom to spend extra had with a student with special needs, just to relate to them or get them on the same page as the class? I would love to get to be able to have a cooking session with a student like Lois can, but the classroom dynamics are not conducive for this!

Barb sees herself as Mary rather than Martha--she is contemplative and sitting at the feet of Jesus. Barb: "Know your part, be your part, play your part with conviction." "Neurodiversity is not good; it's God."

Reading Response

The article that I read in place of Ormrod’s Chapter 4 was “Critical Race Theory, Multicultural Education, and the Hidden Curriculum of Hegemony,” by Michelle Jay. I was immediately captivated by her approach, especially since I have just gotten a grasp on Critical Race Theory through a couple of English classes I took last semester. As a high school student, I was always quick to pick up on the fact that every textbook inevitably had a diverse sampling of people from different ethnicities and races scattered throughout its pages in forms of images, personal narratives or blips, or other perspective-giving means. Through this article, I began to wonder for the first time: is that enough? Multicultural education is defined by Jay as having goals “to reduce prejudice and discrimination against oppressed groups, to work toward equal opportunity and social justice for all groups, and to effect an equitable distribution of power among members of different cultural groups” (3, italics mine). Does the multicultural education we implement in schools distribute power to minority groups—whether based on race, class, gender, or culture? If multicultural education rather simply attempts to spread tolerance or “just getting along,” then the status quo remains, which in turn means that a hegemony exists: white males still have a larger share of the power. It seems harsh to put it like that, but I believe it to be so. Jay is not surprised by this fact, for she admits that “transformative knowledge,” or putting multicultural education into action, “is dangerous. It threatens those dominant groups in our society who have a vested interest in the… maintenance of dominant structures, long-present inequalities, and the current power arrangements” (5).

How can I as a teacher bring about change? I may be unusual, for I will (hopefully) be working in a school where the minority groups are the majority. Of course this does not mean I will not encounter prejudice from dominant groups; indeed, every day I imagine I will be combating stereotypes against whites, or perhaps a student who is poorer or has a parent in jail, or “blacker” students than others, or even a student of a different religion or cultural background. One stereotype I am especially passionate against combating is that “to be intelligent is to be white.” This is perhaps its own hegemony—that to succeed in a “white world” would somehow “acting white.” Instead, I want to instill great pride in my students’ background and race, so that they are confident enough to work through the hegemony of the “white world” they inevitably live in.

Chapter 3 Song

You walked into the party like you were walking onto a yacht  
Your hat strategically dipped below one eye  
Your scarflette was apricot 
 You had one eye in the mirror as you watched yourself gavotte  
And all the girls dreamed that they'd be your partner  
They'd be your partner, and...

You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you 
You're so vain, I'll bet you think this song is about you  
Don't you? don't you?

You had me several years ago when I was still quite naive 
Well you said that we made such a pretty pair 
And that you would never leave 
But you gave away the things you loved and one of them was me  
I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee  
Clouds in my coffee, and...

You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you  
You're so vain, I'll bet you think this song is about you 
Don't you? don't you? don't you?

I had some dreams they were clouds in my coffee  
Clouds in my coffee, an
You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you  
You're so vain, I'll bet you think this song is about you
Don't you? don't you?

Well I hear you went up to Saratoga and your horse naturally won  
Then you flew your Lear Jet up to Nova Scotia  
To see the total eclipse of the sun  
Well you're where you should be all the time  
And when you're not you're with  
Some underworld spy or the wife of a close friend  
Wife of a close friend, and...

You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you  
You're so vain, I'll bet you think this song is about you  
Don't you? don't you? don't you?

This is the song I chose to represent an idea from Chapter 3. Especially the bold lyrics exemplify imaginary audience, in which young teenagers believe themselves to be the center of attention and as a result are often obsessed with their physical appearance. I will witness this much in my high school classroom.

Ch. 2 QtC's

I cannot assume that all the high school students in my English classroom will have achieved Piaget’s developmental stage of formal operational stage. In fact, Piaget concedes that some adults never even reach this stage. For those who are not yet at the stage, I will need to exert patience and spend extra time working with them. I can model my own cognitive processes in front of the class to display the way one would go about thinking through the dilemma or complex issue. For example, if a student cannot grasp logic “if then” scenarios, I could walk through the way my mind solves the problem verbally, or in a visual diagram on the board. In regards to books, students who have not reached this stage may also have difficulty imagining a fantastic story plot, or putting themselves in the shoes of unusual characters, or understanding metaphors or symbolism. In this case, I believe it will be extremely effective to have peers who have reached this developmental stage model their own thinking processes to the students who have not.

After looking over Table 2.2 for grades 9-12, I began to think about how I can incorporate activities which will encourage language development in this age group. Especially if I teach in an urban setting, there will be a great need for the “language” of middle class and professionalism to be explicitly taught to students who may only hear the slang of their socio-economic class and culture. I want to impress that like it or not, there is a certain “dialect” that is expected in different situations, such as job interviews or in college. I could do an activity where I put the differences between classes out in the open and allow my students to say whatever they think about higher classes than them. Then we could “translate” a passage full of slang or terms they would know into “middle class, professional” language. It would be okay if the activity was slightly humorous. As an English teacher, several of the other strategies are necessarily a part of the classroom, such as exploring complex syntactic structures or consider the underlying meanings and messages in poetry and fiction.  I am looking forward to being able to aid in guiding my students’ language development.

Ch. 10 QtC's

Talking about modeling in class discussion this week has reminded me of one of the most effective times a teacher modeled a thinking process for me. It was a college professor, three years into my English major. I had spent all of high school and college getting good grades on my papers, and knew how to produce a piece of writing that would please my professors, while still not having to spend too much effort on it. But this particular college professor was not satisfied with my writing remaining stagnantly decent. She presented a very informal, very useful explanation into everything: exactly where to search for research and how to skim through articles, how to begin thinking about a topic (rather than searching through the book for evidence and then organizing a topic based on that, choosing a topic first and then close reading for evidence on that!), and most importantly how to formulate a thesis. The presentation has stuck with me ever since and has provided me with many resources for successful paper writing since. 

While this would be too complex of an issue to discuss with my students, I do think I can model a thinking process through something like writing in my future English classroom.  Many high schoolers do not know how to go about beginning a paper, and see a blank Word document as overwhelming. There is a definite process which can make it so much easier! I would have to present my tips as interesting and beneficial enough to motivate my students to give the correct amount of attention, retention, and motor reproduction to be able to later model this positive behavior.

In my case study, I want to encourage in the misbehaving students the importance of their own self-regulation and self-efficacy. After taking them aside and presenting a behavior and consequence plan, I want to relay to them that to succeed in future important contexts, such as college or the workforce, it is extremely important to be able to self-regulate oneself.  Additionally, I want to impart that the students CAN achieve in my classroom and do not have to revert to clowning around to gain attention or deflect my requirements.

Ch. 9 QtC's

Since we have been talking about behaviorism in class, I have finally been able to formulate an idea of this as a learning theory—something beyond behavior modification. I have been able to pinpoint some aspects of learning that behaviorism may be missing, but I have also found many positive attributes I hope to use in my high school classroom. One of my fears is to get to the point in an extremely disruptive classroom where the students do not listen to what I say and I feel stuck in a rut of being disrespected and disliked. Through this chapter I’ve been able to think through how I can prevent getting to that point, and can redirect attentions and behaviors when they do get out of hand.

It seems to me that behaviorists are continually assessing the progress of their students by the number of times a student repeats a behavior. As a teacher, my lesson objectives will be successfully mastered when I have reinforced them (through positive or negative reinforcement) enough times that a student is naturally inclined to repeat a behavior or remember a learning goal.  

For my CSEL case study, I could certainly apply behaviorist tools to modify the disruptive behaviors of Tony, Jeff, and Morris. It appears that these boys are seeking attention, but I cannot think of a way that ignoring them would be beneficial in this situation—as the Teacher Project from today encouraged. The behaviors of passing notes and text messaging would only increase if I ignored them, and roughhousing is simply not acceptable and would garner the attention of the other students in the class even if I chose to ignore it. If the behavior has truly gotten to an unmanageable point, and the students simply refuse to follow the rules, it may be necessary to enact a form of punishment—either by adding something undesirable, such as In-School Suspension, or by taking away something desirable, such as free time at the end of the class. For encouraging the productive and on-task behaviors of the other students, I can use smaller-scale reinforcers by expressing praise or, most significantly in my opinion, by instilling intrinsic motivators. There’s nothing like a well-earned feeling of satisfaction after doing well on a test or performing well on a choir song to reinforce studying hard or practicing much!

Ch. 8 QtCs

Teaching writing may be one of the hardest but most useful things I will have to address in the classroom. Unfortunately, I will not have the privilege of guiding individual students through the entire process of improving their writing; rather, I will have a group of students for only one year to either introduce or refine their writing skills.  Thus, I do not want to take lightly the importance of using my time in a classroom down the road efficiently.

I have always enjoyed writing, down to young elementary school when I was writing books and printing them off for my entire family to see. Throughout high school—my first experience with a teacher grading my work other than my mother—I always received exemplary grades on papers, a trend which has typically continued and perhaps led to my English major. I can’t help but wonder…what led me to this point? Perhaps I had some natural ability, but I also believe the way I was taught writing benefited me greatly, if not completely formed the way I write. The actual program was called Institute for Excellence in Writing, and its main goals were to initially—think Elementary years—instill ideas about structure and drill rules about how to formulate sentences, paragraphs and essays, until as an older student one would use these practices naturally.  One day, I would like to require some of these ideas in my own students. For example, I will require a checklist to be turned in with each paper, indicating exactly what I am looking for. There will be items dealing with technicalities such as “MLA format used,” or “Do not use first person such as ‘I’.” There will also be items dealing with stylistics, such as “Use at least two vocabulary words we have studied in class,” or “Thesis sentence is arguable and at the end of your introductory paragraph.” This checklist will give a structure and focus for my students to begin thinking about the way they are writing—which, essentially, is thinking on a page.

I hope to encourage and foster metacognitive and problem-solving skills in the way I compel my students to analyze their own writing. The organizational pre-writing process is extremely vital to the creation of a paper, especially for students who feel as if they have never mastered the writing process in the first place. To improve this, I hope to create a classroom culture in which taking notes, making annotations or summaries, and highlighting important information within the books or other works of literature we read will be necessary for success.

The final step I will use in teaching effective writing skills to my students will be to organize small-groups of peer reviewing.  This will require convergent thinking, as several minds will be put together to try to come up with the best possible way a paper could be organized or bettered. However, it will also involve divergent thinking, as one paper—seen through the eyes of multiple students—could potentially take on several different forms. In the same way, this activity will involve both algorithmic and heuristic problem-solving strategies, the students can use the checklist and other resources to go through a sequence of steps to eliminate errors, but will also be asked to improve the quality of the content of the paper—a task which may or may not fully be achieved.