Welcome to American Public School

UPDATED Reminder: Blog posts are due for your responses to (1) the research conference and (2) the Social Justice Speaker Series talk. These need to be completed before the final exam on Tuesday, 12/13. If you missed the conference, please see me ASAP about an alternative post. If you missed the social justice talk, you can make it up by going to the next one on 12/1, at 7pm, in St. Joe's Lounge.

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This week we are exploring the history of American public schools and current controversies around public education in  this country. You can check out today's video here. I asked you to focus on the agendas and intentions of those providing or advocating public education as we have for the other education systems we have looked at this semester. Consider the importance of education for a democratic citizenry for example. 

Your assignment, due before class on Thursday, is to find a strong on-line article on a current controversy of public education from the list below, or one you come up with, and write a précis (summary) of the article. Please send me the link and the summary by email, or post them to the comments here.

• Common Core
• Standardization Conspiracies
• Bussing/Segregation
• Costs (~$10k/yr)
• Charter Schools (which ones work?)
• Bilingual Education
• Home Schooling
• Vouchers
• Religion/Prayer in Schools/Creation-Evolution, etc.
• Discipline/Violence/Security

National Political Institutes of Education

Update: For Thursday's class, read the excerpts posted as NAPOLA under handouts on the campus portal page for this class if you didn't get a copy in class today. Write a 15 minute free response and bring it to class with you. We're going to discuss empathy, literacy, and fiction, and look at ideas of Steven Pinker and others. Here's the Elif Shafak Ted Talk.

For Tuesday's class, please download from campus portal and read excerpts from All the Light We Cannot See, the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Anthony Doerr. You can also watch Disney's cartoon, "Education for Death."

Values and Vocations

Congratulations on your research project and last Thursday's conference. If you haven't already done so, please post to your blog, reflecting on the following questions:

What did you learn at the Conference? To what extent did you learn from the content of your peers’ presentations? …from their example as presenters? …from the communal act of supporting them as a member of the audience? 

Today's Self-Affirmation of Values exercise follows on the topic of Stereotype Threat that we explored last month. You can review some of the research in this article. A more extended video than the one we watched in class can be found here.

For Thursday's class, please complete the Windy Path Exercise found on the All FYE Blog as discussed today in class. Please bring your path to class with thought and questions to share.

IMPORTANT: Attending the Social Justice Speaker Series on Thursday, November 17th, at 4:30 p.m. is mandatory. Rose Jacobs-Gibson will be the invited speaker. In preparation, please read “A High Price to Pay: The Economic and Social Costs of Youth Gun Violence in San Mateo County.”

Research Project Due Thursday (Conference Mandatory)

The class research project on Collaborative/Cooperative Learning is due in class on Thursday. We will spend the class session on Thursday smoothing it out and preparing the presentation for Thursday afternoon's conference (3-4:40 in the Cafeteria).

Our greatest challenge is to coordinate with each other between now and Thursday and allow for everyone in the class to have access to the shared documents. Therefore, I am calling for the links to the google-docs that your groups are making public and anything else you think would be helpful. I will post them on the blog today.

If you were absent, please review the class blog, where I have posted the tasks and members of each group. The email message contains the NDNU email addresses of every student in the seminar so that you can connect if you haven't already.

Looking forward to another lively session with you all on Thursday!

• Google Docs for Intro
• Google Docs for Group 1 (Local schools that claim to use cooperative/collaborative learning)
• Google Docs for Group 2 (Connecting with teachers and others using it)
• Google Docs for Group 3 (Background and Sources)
• Google Docs for Group 4 (Neuroscience behind cooperation in humans)
• SLIDES