NCLB

I thought that Monday's lecture was very interesting. I really enjoyed hearing about how teachers and administrators feel about NCLB. I also really liked listening to them answer questions about anything that had to do with things we might face in the future when teaching. I felt like this was a very useful way to use our time. I thought that both of those administrators gave us very good answers about No Child Left Behind. They told us their views about this only being one piece of the pie and that there are still plenty of things to teach in your own way. I also thought that they did a very good job explaining the whole issue of NCLB. Another thing that I liked was that they gave us a different prospective rather then the normal view that a lot of people have about NCLB being a bad thing. I thought over all this was a very good way to spend our time for a lecture. I would really enjoy having other outside speakers come. I really like hearing teachers prospective that are actually working in our schools.

Ed. Psych Forum

This week we had a mock school board meeting, about what to do with the situation going on at High Stakes High School. I really enjoyed this, because I got to hear a lot of different perspectives then just the people from my class. I learned a lot about what some rules that our teachers wanted to put in place at that school. I found this really interesting. It opened my eyes in a lot of ways to see what really might happen in a school, when the superintendent tries to change a rule that everyone is happy with already. I'm sure that a lot of people in these three classes felt very strongly for what they saw wrong or right with this proposal. I am one of those people that can sometimes be easily swayed one way or the other, and I felt really unsure about this whole thing. I realized that there were some parts of their new plan that really would work well in schools, but there were also many parts that I thought to myself there is no way that will work. I liked that we got to hear every ones views on each topic and also that we ourselves got to share our feelings and thoughts, which sometimes doesn't happen. Over all I felt like this was a very good way to use that hour lecture time, and I felt like I wanted to spend more time on it so that we could have voted to pass or fail the proposal.

Library Lecture

This past Monday we had a lecture on library resources and how to use them. I felt like this was not something I really needed to be hearing about. We learned a lot of this information when we were in Paideia last year. I did like that it was a refresher for library use but it just seemed to drag on. I know the website changed from last year. I just felt like that wasn't something I needed to learn again. There are plenty of other things that would have been more useful to be learning about. I liked just seeing how the site worked but I'm sure many of us out there thought "I could learn all of this on my own, why do I need to sit here and listen?" I do like listening to lectures don't get me wrong, but I just didn't really feel like this was a lecture I needed to hear. Maybe if I was a first year and didn't really know my way around the library at all and didn't know much about the Internet. I'm sure there might have been some people at the lecture that really felt it was helpful to them and it really didn't hurt me to hear it again. It just was not interesting to listen to. If it was made more interesting then I really wouldn't mind at all going to the lecture.