Today, with the exponential rise in childhood obesity, it
would seem that health and food education would be high in priorities within
the elementary school setting.
At the school I teach at, almost all of our students receive
free and reduced lunch. Since they
receive it, they have to take a school lunch everyday, even if they brought
their own lunch. There is one student
who is overweight. He receives a school
lunch, even though he brings his school lunch everyday. This past week, in his lunch from home, he
had a whole bag of chips (not the snack size).
He ate the whole bag, the rest of his lunch, and his school lunch. When he threw away the empty bag of chips, I
looked at the nutritional facts on the back of the bag. He had consumed over 1, 000 calories in just
chips! In addition, I invited a group of
girls to have lunch with me this past week.
They all received school lunch, although a few of them also had lunch
from home as well. In one of the lunches
was a whole package of salami lunchmeat that she ate. If sociologists view schools a place “to
provide those knowledges, skills, attitudes, and the like that will help people
to deal intelligently with contemporary problems” (Tyler, 1949, p. 5) we are
failing.
While planning curriculum, it is important to use multiple
sources of data in decided what should be taught. If every school is different, how can all
schools within one state be mandated to teach the same exact things? A question I often wonder is, are we wasting
our time teaching things just because they have been taught for the past 50
years? Take cursive writing for
instance; it is required for my students to know how to write in cursive. I understand that some people (for the past
50 years) write in cursive, so they must know how to read it. But, when asked, many responses I hear
students getting are, “You want to be able to sign your paychecks, don’t
you?” Well the real question is: are
these students going to have to be able to sign paychecks? My paycheck is electronically deposited. In addition, with technology, chances are
that they students in the workforce will not be writing at all. Maybe teaching keyboarding skills would be
more beneficial for our students to learn. Are we preparing our students for a digital and technology rich world?
Khan presents an interesting movement in education and
technology. If we are talking about
getting data and feedback from students.
What they want to learn and how they want to learn it, Khan’s
educational database is moving in the right direction for our time. In a sense, this online system works. It does allow teachers to have more accurate
data on their students, as well as be able to spend more time one-on-one. One Idea I did not like about his theory was
that it used peer-to-peer tutoring. In
mention, these were not students whom wanted to be a tutor, but were only
proficient in the material. Research has
shown that many students who are ahead of other students do not enjoy
“teaching” other students; they see this as a burden. They would rather continue working at a
higher level and solving problems or having discussions with others at their
same level or interests. “The problems should not be the kinds of
questions in which the answer can be immediately obtained by looking them up in
the textbook or some other reference material” (Tyler, 1949, p. 69) If students
should learn through experiences to develop a higher level, as well as
different types, of thinking. Should we
be submitting these students to peer-to-peer tutoring scenario if it is
unwanted?
As we take all of this into consideration, we look back at what we taught this year and start planning for next year. What worked? What didn't? This can be hard because there can be many factors - students playing a large part. Will these same things work with my students next year? Will they have different needs?
