Is the curriculum and teaching the right way to do it?

In the article titled Rigor Redefined by Tony Wagner the author is leaning towards making schools have a better curriculum and preparing them for jobs in their future. After research in classrooms and talking to employees how are high up in their job, he says that in most classrooms we aren’t preparing the students well enough for jobs.
The central idea of this article is; are schools providing us with the right skills we need for our future job. I was surprised when the number one thing big businesses were looking for where employees who could question well. Clay Parker, president of the Chemical Management Division of BOC Edwards, said: “First and foremost, I look for someone who asks good questions, we can teach them the technical stuff, but we can't teach them how to ask good questions—how to think.” I can relate to this because in my English class, I am very inquisitive. What makes a good question though? Another thing that surprised me was the fact that they hardly even mentioned grade point average or what college you went to. I mean, I know they look at that but if I were a big business owner I would look at GPA and how you did in high school and college. The business owners also said they wanted someone who could engage in a good discussion.
Wagner also examined some classroom situations. He was surprised about how the students either weren’t engaged or how much they didn’t know. (These weren’t just average classroom situations, they were advance placement classes.) Wagner said, “The students weren’t engaged and it looked like they were falling asleep.” During the expectations of the classrooms he found a room that he thought was perfect. The algebra-two teacher put a question up on the board that required the knowledge of their past years of math. The teacher said “After each of your groups is done coming up with two ways of how to solve this problem I will select some of you at random. You will come up to the board and show how your group solved problem.” Wagner stated this was one of the best ways of teaching because it gets everyone has to do the problem since someone will be selected at randomly. Second it is something that the students have never seen in the past. Lastly, Wagner said they have to find ways to solve the problems that will get them thinking.
Are we teaching the students the right things for the future?

Parents not caringanymore about swine flu!

For my article of choice to read this week, I choose an interesting one from MSNBC News titled A third of U.S. parents oppose swine flu vaccine. This article talks about how some parents don’t want to get their kids vaccinated for swine flu because of some of the possible side effects. What could some of the possible side effects be for the swine flu? Could some of the possible side effects for swine flu be worse than swine flu itself? I couldn’t find what some of the side effects would be so I just skipped that part. If you don’t want to give you or your kids the vaccine, then you could die just like a man did less than a week ago. That is basically letting your kids get sick. Connections that were brought to my mind were ‘pox parties’ where parents would let their kids get chicken pox. Or I heard that parents didn’t want to let to have the side effects to different flu’s in the past. Parents say ‘it’s not safe”, or “it’s too unknown and to untested to try. After test on volunteers, no side effects were found. Health and Human services secretary said “we know its safe and secure.” If the doctors and the internet say there is no side effects or nothing to worry about, why are parents freaking out so much? Another alternative is for kids to get them at school. Wait, hold on a minute. I have never heard of vaccines being at schools. Is that legal? Do they have that at Arapahoe? After further research on http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30435064/ns/health-swine_flu it is estimated that there are about 803 nationwide because of the swine flu and I’m still surprised that parents don’t even care. “It’s no bigger then a regular seasonal flu” they say but do 803 people die from just a regular flu. I mean, I know some people get it and just blow through it but other people are dying because of it. I think it’s wrong and very bad parenting for parents not to care.

Bye Bye Friends!

This week I read an article about Obama titled More School? Obama Could Trim Summer break by MSNBC News. It talk’s about how Obama wants to make summer break shorter or even no summer break at all. The article also says how he wants to make us go to school three hours more then we usually do. If he has it his way then we might as well say goodbye to all of our friends because we will never have any time to hang out with them because school is so long. I think this is truly unfair because kids need at least a little bit of freedom from their teachers droning on about dumb boring stuff that we really don’t even need to know if we want to be successful in life. Obama says the other countries are beating us out. On average kids in America have 180 days of school a year. Kids in Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have on average 190-201 days of school. BIG DEAL! It’s not like ten or fifteen more days of school each year is going to make the difference on you being a rocket scientist or a person who works at McDonalds. In school, it depends on how much you pay attention and listen. Also if we had no summer break, places like Disney World and other major amusement parks would go out of business because everyone would be in school during the summer. This is also unfair to teachers because they don’t get the regular freedom they want also. They already don’t get very much vacation time, and when they do go on a vacation or something, they have to pay for a substitute to come in. I’m sure we would all be esteemed if Obama cut summer break and made the school days longer.

This week I read an article about Obama titled More School? Obama Could Trim Summer break by MSNBC News. It talk’s about how Obama wants to make summer break shorter or even no summer break at all. The article also says how he wants to make us go to school three hours more then we usually do. If he has it his way then we might as well say goodbye to all of our friends because we will never have any time to hang out with them because school is so long. I think this is truly unfair because kids need at least a little bit of freedom from their teachers droning on about dumb boring stuff that we really don’t even need to know if we want to be successful in life. Obama says the other countries are beating us out. On average kids in America have 180 days of school a year. Kids in Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have on average 190-201 days of school. BIG DEAL! It’s not like ten or fifteen more days of school each year is going to make the difference on you being a rocket scientist or a person who works at McDonalds. In school, it depends on how much you pay attention and listen. Also if we had no summer break, places like Disney World and other major amusement parks would go out of business because everyone would be in school during the summer. This is also unfair to teachers because they don’t get the regular freedom they want also. They already don’t get very much vacation time, and when they do go on a vacation or something, they have to pay for a substitute to come in. I’m sure we would all be esteemed if Obama cut summer break and made the school days longer.

the H1N1 virus advancment

This week I read a blog titled H1N1, Skype, and a Possible Tipping Point by Karl Fisch. It talks about how even though kids have the flu; they are still participating in their daily school life. How you ask. The students do something called skyping. What is skyping though? After further research, I learned that skyping is basically just talking through webcam. Skyping allows you to participate from another location. To me this was different and above expectations, but hey, it’s Arapahoe. If I was sick or any of my friends were sick, I know that my friends or I would not even want to think about school. Not that we are bad students but if it were you, what would you do. I agree with Mr. Fisch when he says “the students want to participate” and “the impressive thing is the student’s willingness to be connected to the class when they are home feeling crummy.” It’s obvious how much these students wanted to learn and get involved.
In the blog, he also talks about how this could be a turning point for our society. He states this because it is advancement in our daily lives with our technology. Instead of being at home sick with the flu doing nothing, we can now be in class when we’re home sick. The H1N1 virus is sweeping across the globe and it is making people absent from school, work, ect. We don’t have to miss class any more over this epidemic because we have tools like Skype to help us get involved.

Swine Flu Vaccine

For my world news article I read U.S. to share swine flu vaccine globally by Associated Press. It talks about how we are going to share the vaccine of swine flu, also called H1N1 virus, worldwide. If they go through with this then I think it would be a great accomplishment for not only the United states but for other countries. The World. the United States says that they are working with other countries, Austrailia, Brazil, France, Italy, New Zeland, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, and sharing different vaccines. that is the part that struck me. Why does the world have multiple vaccines? What if one of them doesn't work? Why cant the world just have one super vaccine? I think that they should make it a law or something that you have to go to the doctor about once a month to check if you have swine flu until the epidemic is cured. School and other major things are getting shut down because of it. At Hospitals if you don't get a flu shot by a certain time then you have to wear a mask. At church one day, we couldn't even make physical contact because a kid at 6the church's school was infected. If we find a cure for this then there would be no more school shut downs. t would be a huge success.

Speech! (education blog)

In The Obama Speech by Will Richardson talked about how he thinks schools should show speeches during the day. He has a strong opinion about this because where is a better place to discribe something then where you learn the most. I agree with most of this. The part i don't agree with is if you don't want to watch the speech you don't have to. The only thing is you could be missing some valuble information and that is your fault. At school, a debate can start and really get kids thinking. New ideas and new perspectives of things can blossum while talking about a speech or even a piece of text. Like he says talking about speeches at schools can make us have a different veiw on the world fom just one opinion. His last sentence in the article says " But without that, any way you look at it, this is not a great moment for schools." I think this is one hundred percent true. schools can't do as much as they want to because some parent wont let the school do that.