Jan McLaughlin has been vlogging her way up the East Coast on her Road Node 101 tour, from community media centers, to classrooms. One of her stops took her to a GED class in Upstate New York Worcester Massachussetts where she captured a rap battle between students. For those unaccustomed, rap battles are like verbal boxiing matches, each participant trying to jab, bodyblow, and land the occasional haymaker, with words. But as gory as the monologs get, it’s in fun. You can see one of the participants smiling as he gets taken apart by his adversary. At the end of the segment, Jan gives me a credit on the piece, I guess because I have been talking about videoblogs in Education lately. I’m happy to be associated with this piece, though I hope never to see anyones “Brains on the curb looking like linguini.”
Carl Weaver, the teacher of the GED class, says at the end that he thinks teachers need to think less about their pupils’ learning styles and more about their teaching styles. I guess he is saying that us teachers need to rethink what we are doing to reach these students who, who have a hard time getting traction on the road to the American dream.
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4 responses so far ↓
Carl Weaver // Oct 14, 2005 at 11:07 pm
Hi, Jonny. Actually, that was Worcester, MA - the Paris of central MA.
Yeah, what I meant by that is that there’s a lot of talk about learning styles, which sounds good and insightful, but it has to be our charge to go out and develop our teaching styles to mesh with what the students need. It can’t be a passive thing. We have to take education by the balls and really twist it around to make it work.
These young people drop out for various reasons - boredom, legal issues, pregnancy, gang involvement, low self esteem and substance abuse, to name just a few root causes. Whatever the reason, the kids are not being engaged. I get a lot of students in my class saying their teachers encouraged them to drop out. Can you believe that? I don’t think that’s right.
My colleague at work says we get two large groups of kids. One is the group that is not smart enough to finish high school. We can’t help them; they will never make it. The other group is made up of kids with social, psychological and behavioral problems that got in the way during high school. We can’t help them either - they still have those problems. Of course, there are some others who have changed their ways or else simply fall through the cracks who need extra handholding or a different structure. They are our favorites.
Sorry to take up so much space here. We really need to be more active as a society when planning our education systems. We can’t just keep labeling some kids as good, others as bad and hoping they get thrown in the joint before they confront us for their bad grades. If the ones with social issues, etc. are still experiencing those problems, we have let the ball drop, and it’s not the teacher’s fault. It’s everyone’s fault - inside and outside the school. Raising kids has to be a shared responsibility.
Cheers,
Carl
jonny goldstein // Oct 18, 2005 at 3:04 am
Glad you elaborated on this a little.
Carl Weaver // Oct 18, 2005 at 11:48 pm
Yeah - sorry to dominate your blog space here. When you are crazy enough to give a damn about such people you feel moved to talk a blue streak about the issues. Thanks for featuring this story. It needs to be told.
jonny goldstein // Oct 19, 2005 at 12:12 am
No prob carl. My blog comment real estate is unlimited. It’s not like I’m gonna run out of paper. Post all you like.
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