Welcome!

Welcome to my blog! This is a place for me to organize and display my thoughts on education and get feedback. My current plan is to open a private high school called Murray Academy. Above are pages with my most recent thoughts. Enjoy!

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Seminars

One subject I think would be very interesting for a seminar would be security. Things like national security and security in the school.

PE classes

I was thinking briefly about taking away PE class in the normal ten period schedule and putting physical education on the weekend, but I'm considering changing that. For balance, I should not take away PE. However, if I did, I could replace it with a life skills class that include things like home economics.

For PE, I'm thinking single-gender classes, and a few things I could teach in it would be martial arts and defense and tumbling.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Higher Math and Science

My resolve may waver at some point, so I must write this down now: I MUST require my students to have higher levels of science and math. In my comparative education class today, we watched a video called "2 Million Minutes" (apparently there are about two million minutes in the life of a high school student across the four years), which compared education in the United States to that in India and China, and I was a little ashamed to be an American.

One point that particularly stood out to me was that many American students do not take any science past general chemistry or math past algebra 2 and that most parents and administrators think we are teaching our students enough math and science. The video stressed that Americans do not realize that we are lagging behind on the global scale and that we need to step up our game.

Summary: We need a lot more science and a lot more math, and that is going into my school. I'm pretty sure I want my kids in math up to calculus and statistics and higher level science in at least a few of the subjects.

Sports and Arts

Things are changing in my mind! Maybe there won't be 10 classes as originally planned...I'm thinking the sports and arts should be separate from school, perhaps with a semester or two required of each in the four years of high school. When I was growing up, my parents required me to participate in one sport and one music thing every year, and past that I could choose. I've taken basketball, soccer, gymnastics, swimming, and dance, and piano, violin, and voice, and I think I have very much benefitted from all of these.

That is why I wanted to require arts and sports of all of my students. However, I am recently finding out that schools in high-achieving nations like Sweden and Finland do not offer as many of these activities to their students, nor are the students as pressured into them as they are in the United States. They're considered distractions and like they put too much pressure on students.

I still think sports and arts are very important for an education, and at the younger level, students should be required to try these things, but I think at the older level, it can be hard to require students to do these things - particularly, for example, sports if they are uncordinated or art if they are not talented in it - especially if they do not enjoy it.

So, my solution at the present is to require students to participate in at least one sport or art (or maybe club like debate) every year but that they can choose from there. Perhaps there could be auditions and try-outs for certain ones and other general classes. For example, an audition choir and an open choir.

It's Just a Marker

As part of my American Education class this semester, I tutor International students at the local high school. It is known as a fairly good school. Today, most of the class I work with was on a field trip, so I sat in on a Literature class with another teacher, and I found some appalling things.

First, much of this high school literature class did not know what personification is. I brushed that one off because their current unit is literary devices, so I assumed they were still learning. However, the next one was a shocker: one of the students did not know how to open the marker he was given. For a long time, I did not even know what to do with that information. How did a teenage survive without knowing how to open a marker. And no, he was not just joking about not knowing how to open it.

Next, the class had to go over what the five senses are. The teacher mentioned that this was something the students should have learned in elementary school, but she still had to go over it with them (they were talking about imagery or something). And last, when being quizzed on the word "hyperbole," some of the students did not know what the word exaggeration means, and that is not a terribly advanced word.

I was about to lose faith in education, but a few minutes later, I found out I was in a literature class with all international students. At least that accounts for their not knowing "personification" and "exaggeration." Also, identifying the five senses could be a cultural thing. However, every student in every country - at least in my opinion - should see a marker and be able to open it. The student was from Kenya, I believe. This is a major reflection on education in other countries, and this needs to be fixed.

Monday, April 9, 2012

Finland

In an article by Ellen Gamerman, "What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?" I read that one big aspect of education is that adults do not hover very much when the kids are young, which contributes heavily to their academic success. In fact, I also read in a parenting article a few months ago that French parents treat their kids similarly and often have much fewer discipline problems than do American parents.

Back to Finland, the article also talks about their having a back-to-basics teaching technique, so there are no sports teams, advanced classes, marching bands, or proms, which I found interesting because I believe in a very holistic education.

What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?


Thursday, April 5, 2012

England

We had a educational comparativist come into my, shocker, Comparative Education class last week. One thing she showed us that I thought was interesting - particularly because I briefly went to a British School - was that in some schools, English children stand as the teacher enters the room at the beginning of class. Just something to think about in teaching a culture of respect.