This class to me was a class of self discovery. It helped me understand what I really felt, and what I had been raised to feel. I hope you can take advantage of all your opportunities in this class, because there is not a week that goes by that I am not reminded of an issue that came up. These issues are social, and they are real. You are surrounded by them everyday, so open your eyes and allow yourself to discover exactly what each of these issues is all about.

Finally, dont let this class be the end. Dr. Talbert has an amazing skill for inspriring his students, and he can spark your interest in the issues rather easily. Keep searching for answers, and keep searching for the truth. This class will fly by and when it is over, dont stop questioning yourself and others.

I miss it already

Consistent/Inconsistent with experience: In almost all of my classes where I have watched teachers and tried to learn from their practices, almost all of them share at least one thing, they are in charge. Most teachers make the classroom about them, what they want to teach, how they want to teach it, and when they want to teach it. bell hooks trys to demonstrate through this passage how teachers and students can get more out of the lesson if they are open and accepting towards eachother. When hooks says critiques at the end of the year don’t do any good, she understands that different students have different needs, and why should the students of one class say what a different class will need from her?

Consistent/inconsistent with beliefs: I have always been a strong believer that both teacher and student get more out of a class lesson when they put something into it, but I cannot say this is something I practice often. It is hard to trust students to give responsible feedback, and hard to trust them to play an active role when past experiences show the opposite. I believe that students are able to impact the classroom, and I think it is beneficial to all sides when they do, but I also believe it can be dangerous in how you do this. As a teacher, I will be teaching high school students; Of all the great traits they hold, it is important to remember that they are rebellious, adventurous, and mischevious. I think it is important to find a balance between a focused organized classroom and one that offers freedom and openness.

Future impact: bell hooks really demonstrated in her book some examples where students were able to really learn valuable lessons through her engaged pedagogy. While I believe people get more out of something when they put something personal into it, and can relate to it, I have never been able to experience this as a teacher personally. I believe this outlook will provide a new goal for my classroom, a goal of helping students discover something epiphical because of the teamwork achieved in my future classroom.

            Bell hooks is a black woman teacher, that entered her field of study because of her love for education and her desire for teaching to take a more pedagogical approach to learning. As she encountered her own education, she became increasingly aware of the domination that took place in the classroom, referring to white supremacy, as well as the control that teachers maintained. She began to dislike and devalue schooling because she did not feel like she was gaining a valuable and critical education. She followed Freire’s works and his alliance to education that everyone contributed to. She fights for equality in races and sexes through the education in which everyone contributes and values experience as well as knowledge.

4 Key Passages

1)      “Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself” (3).

2)      “To enter classroom settings in colleges and universities with the will to share the desire to encourage excitement was to transgress” (7).

3)      “Teaching is a performative act. And it is that aspect of our work that offers the space for change, invention, spontaneous shifts, that can serve as a catalyst drawing out the unique elements in each classroom” (11).

4)      “Making the classroom a democratic setting where everyone feels a responsibility to contribute is a central goal of transformative pedagogy” (39).

3 Key Terms

1)      ”Banking System of Education”-“based on the assumption that memorizing information and regurgitating it represented gaining knowledge that could be deposited, stored, and used at a later date” (5).

2)      “Conscientization”- “critical awareness and engagement” (14).

3)      “Praxis”-“Action and reflection upon the world in order to change it” (14).

2 Connections

1)      She talked a lot of the control teachers wanted to maintain in their classroom. This power was not only simply because they liked ruling over their “mini-kingdoms” as hooks puts it, but because they needed order. This control is why many teachers feared using progressive approaches to education. They did not want to risk students being unruly and wild. Many of my teachers inhibited our input ridiculously through-out my schooling. They discouraged leadership and encouraged following. I had classes where we were forbidden to even ask questions until after the class period or at least until the lecture was over. I never realized how much of a dictatorship the classroom has become. I had always seen the teacher as the figure of authority, ignoring my own creativity and intellect, simply focusing on regurgitating the information she/he provided.

2)      We have been studying progressive education for the past few weeks in my American Educational Thought class. When hooks mentions some of the progressive ideas and how they valued more of the experience and the individual it sparks all of the discussion we have been having in comparing current education and past methods.

1 Question

1)If we wish to encourage students to take charge of the classroom and lead the discussion, how do we still keep order to help facilitate learning and progress the lesson? Where is the middle line?

• “No other people have been taught systematically to hate themselves-psychic violence-reinforced by the powers of state and civic coercion-physical violence-for the primary purpose of controlling their minds and exploiting their labor for nearly four hundred years” (XIII).
  • -West opens his book by labeling blacks as a conflicted, abused group of individuals that no one can relate to
  • -I assume West does this to help blacks feel special and feel like they have had to overcome something that no one else does
  • -this seems like more of an excuse, a way for them to feel sorry for themselves, rather than change things
  • Every race is subjected to an ideal and imaginary fantasy of what one should be. It is not merely one class or race that is taught to think they are not good enough.
  • -isn’t the goal equality, no black supremacy? Don’t we want both groups to relate to each other rather than focus on their differences?
• “Racial progress is undeniable in America. Never before have we had such colorful menagerie of professionals in business, education, politics, sports, and the labor movement. Glass ceilings have been pierced-not smashed-by extraordinary persons of color” (XIV).
  • -It is true that blacks have begun to play a larger and more apparent role in these areas, but why are you downgrading the progress?
  • -why do you see these people as a few special ones, rather than someone to represent black culture?
•  “The major culprit of democratic possibilities here and abroad is he ever-expanding market culture that puts everything and everyone up for sale” (XVI).
  • -This is a true statement that goes both ways, whites and blacks are abandoning their brother in hopes of a material gain; there is a decreasing value in community support and more increased emphasis on self satisfaction. It is all about what I can get.
• “The functions of parties have been displaced by public polls, and politicians behave less as thermostats that determine the climate of opinion than as thermometers registering the public mood” (10).
  • -this relates well to West’s organizing of black politicians and scholars. It is important that leaders are there to make a difference, to have an opinion and make changes.
  • -What is the point of a leader if all they do is say what the people want to hear if they do not really believe in it?
• “How people act and live are shaped-though in no way dictated or determined-by the larger circumstances in which they find themselves” (18).
  • -I feel like West is too busy being politically correct to actually make a statement.
  • -It defeats his argument that peoples’ background affects their actions, by basically saying, well it could not.
• “Being black means being minimally subject to white supremacist abuse and being part of a rich culture and community that has struggled against such abuse” (39).
  • -This is how we are going to define being black? By focusing on the negatives, it is no wonder blacks have too little ‘self-love’.
  • -West throws in the “rich culture”, but what is his focus? The abuse. If West wants to encourage blacks to excel and succeed despite their past struggles, don’t focus on the past and the negativity, they need encouragement.
•  “To be humble is to be so sure of one’s self and one’s mission that one can forego calling excessive attention to one’s self and status” (59).
  • -How do you think you fit into this West?
  • -I am sure that by most you are considered a black visionary and leader, therefore, how would you be classified.
  • -You demean other leaders and their methods, and I cannot help but to me make you seem more self-righteous.
  • -It is true that you do not claim yourself to be a leader, but to me the man you call for, you need to be colorblind, and yet you work strictly for blacks. You pity them, root for them, and stand by them. How can you condemn leaders for sticking by whites and blacks when this is the goal. We need someone to lead both.
• “Malcom X’s notion of psychic conversion depends on the idea that black spaces, in which black community, humanity, love, care, concern, and support flourish, will emerge from a boiling black rage” (141).
  • -how does it make sense for “love, care, [and] concern” to flourish out of a “black rage”? I understand that Malcom and West believe we need to get upset about the present situation to see change, but we have to look at cause and effect. Since when has rage led to peace? All rage has ever led to, if some sort of change, is a switch in power.

2 Connections

1) Just as in Kozol when the girls talk about how blacks are like objects that white people don’t know what to do with, so they hide them away in the garage, West recognizes and confronts the issue that white people are using and taking advantage of Africans. Whites many times do not recognize what psychological effect they are having on blacks, and some as the girl says in Kozol’s book, they would not care.
2) I cannot help but think of Obama when West talks about black leaders today. Having a black president was a huge step in America politics, but what group would he fit into. Is Obama such a leader that he can push aside his feelings, and risk losing all his power, or is he strictly talking to put on an act, and just working the crowd?

1 Question

1) Can you think of any time you may have inadvertedly hurt someone, or used your “supremacy”? How many times do we act without thinking how it will affect those around us, and how can we be aware of this in the classroom?

Key Passages:

1)      “He learned from his own experience, he said, ‘that integrated education creates better citizens for a democracy. In an increasingly diverse society and an increasingly connected world, it is more important than it ever was’”(238).

2)      “ ‘Here’s the ting that I believe,’ he said. ‘Racist beliefs are so profound and the supportive structures have now been in place so long that after an upheaval like the one we lived through 40 years ago, it leaves the nation morally exhausted’ with ‘a huge desire not to be obliged to think if it again.’ And yet he said, ‘the nationmust be asked to think of it again’”(240).

3)      “They are trying ‘to move society an inch,’ as one member of their legal team put it to me bluntly, ‘when it needs to be moved a mile.’ It may be that they will end up moving it a lot more than ‘an inch’ if legislative leaders in NY should someday act in a responsible compliance with the rulings of the court. Every inch they gain , in any case, is worth the effort it requires to achieve it”(248).

4)      Nobody tells the children that their test results define their worthiness or that these numbers measure their identities, or that the limited forms of learning that are tested by a standardized exam are more important than the ones to which the governmental number cannot be attached.(287)

Key words:

1)      Treasured places (300)- schools where students still learn through discovery and are not over stressed by the requirements of the state and their tests.

2)      Accountable (249)- that which each school, teacher, principle, and child is held based upon the judging of a standardized exam.

3)      Unadjusted numbers (245)- the percentages and differences between the funding provided to low income families, without taking into consideration the greater needs of these children.

Connections- I went to a large minority public school. It was located in the suburbs, and was much better off than many of the schools located down town, but when you compared it to some other schools in our district, you were able to see some of the things we were lacking. We did not have a pool, or certain books, or even enough desks, we had to wait to borrow from other schools in the district.

I had a very special English teacher my junior year. She was different than anything any student at my school had seen. She did not follow the rules for taks, but instead held class outside. We did not have in class writes, but instead wrote journals about nature and such. She was only there a year because of her methods, but the students learned to really enjoy writing, and it did not seem fair that she had to leave when we were still learning what we needed to.

Question:

Do schools prefer to hire teachers that stick strictly to TAKS or do they prefer an unconventional teacher? What are the pros and cons to each?

When we were closing our discussion, we discussed the road less traveled. Some of my classmates commented that we should take the road less traveled because it makes us different; it makes us an individual. Although I agree with this statement, I find it to be more abount the benefits at the end of the road and during the journey. Success is not supposed to be easy, otherwise everyone would be successful, meaning no one would be. I have found that is the struggles, the hard times, the battles that really stretch our character and help us form who we will become. It takes a lot to get the things worth getting, and many students today are not given the opportunity or even the idea to try. Can we really judge their success if they were not opened to the same challenges? What do I mean by this? Compare this to sports. You can be happy you made the team , but you cannot really say you are better than another player who did not even try out simply because he didnt know tryouts were being held. The same is with these inner city students that are being shoved into careers without even being opened to the idea of education. How many Einsteins and Eulers have simply been passed on with the goal of strictly entering the work force. Makes you think.