Parents

The last lecture we had with parents of students from Decorah was not as interesting to me as listening to other teachers talk. I really felt like they did bring a new view to things, but it just gets to be a little repetitive when that is all we hear. I found their views on NCLB to be very interesting. It is always good to hear different views about this. They felt as though it was a good thing but really didn't understand why they needed to only talk about this at conferences. I felt it was good for us future teachers to hear a parents view on meetings and conferences that they will have with us. Parents don't always want to hear negative things and I think sometimes teachers forget this when they are meeting with them. I found this very interesting, and very useful. This keeps me thinking about the future and how I am planning on handling things with parents and students in my class. I have really enjoyed all of these different groups coming in to talk to us. It has given me a lot of different views and changed the way that I used to think about things. I found them all pretty entertaining, and enjoyed hearing their different sides to everything.

School Board Members

This week we had two school board members come talk to our class. I really didn't enjoy this one as much as when the administrators came. I think part of it was that some of the things they said felt like they were being repeated. I do think that having these people come talk is interesting and I do really enjoy it, but maybe there should be more different questions asked rather then the same questions. I liked that these two knew what types of things were going on in the schools. Also I really liked that they could talk about how NCLB has changed the faces of schools everywhere. I also really thought that they did a good job in letting us know that NCLB isn't a bad thing all the time. Yes there are tests that the children have to take but they are still able to learn and have fun. They said something that really made me think, they talked about how we need to have year round schooling in order to compete with other countries. I thought about it and what they said really made since. Kids are loosing information over the summer that they learned the previous year, so why do we not do year round schooling. Well it would cost too much money, but in the long run it would be worth it. I really enjoyed these two speakers and felt that they really knew what they were talking about.