GeoMapping Project

In this project I began by wanting to map out my local elementary schools, mostly because I have friends who work in these schools and so I know first hand the challenges both the kids and the teachers face.  I am also interested in poverty and the effects that poverty has on students and in turn their lives as they go from student to adult.  While I included all the statistics on the CRCTs that were available when it came to the projection of how poverty was impacting our students I focused on Reading and Language Arts.

Also in this project I added public housing into the equation as they tend to be located close to certain schools.  I have a friend who works at Southeast as a Kindergarten teacher and close are the "South Rome Projects" as we all refer to them as, or John Graham Housing as they are properly named.  This school is consistently the worst performing elementary school in the city school system and honestly I wanted to know why.  So by tracing where the other housing authority and Section 8 housing students were attending school and by comparing them against one another it looks as though those particular housing units are not the direct cause of lower testing scores, however it does look as though there is a difference between the Section 8 housing and the Housing Authority in that the later's schools had lower testing scores.

When looking at the 3rd-6th Grade Comparison charts I created you can see that Southeast Elementary School performs consistently poorer than all the other schools in most every grade and subject matter.  The demographics of that school are that 99% of all their kids are qualified for free or reduced lunch.  The second worst performing school, Main Elementary, has 98% of its students on free or reduced lunch.  Elm Street Elementary performs in the middle, but leans more towards being one of the worst schools and though it has a lower number of free and reduced lunch students at 89%, it does has the highest instance of ESOL students at 47% of its student population.

So gathering all the data I see that poverty plays a large roll in the academic achievement of the schools as do students that have a limited English proficiency.  Unfortunately for myself I still don't feel I truly found the "reason" why these schools are performing worse than other schools.  If you ask teachers parental involvement plays a huge role in how their student will perform and learn.  Learning has to be a priority for both the parents and the child.  In all honesty the South Rome Projects where the students attend Southeast have always been the worst of all the housing, followed by the Green and Gold, where students attend Main.  So it seems the correlation between the two may not simply be just what "people say", but it may have some truth to it as well.  The question then turns to how to do we fix it....


https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=217151320616601773639.0004cfa7504ee7c10263c&msa=0&ll=34.276771,-85.143073&spn=0.077024,0.169086

Where I'm From

Where I'm From

Where I'm from comes with a long rich history

Where my grandparents and their grandparents not only lived but survived

The Great Depression that knocked this country to it's knees

And my grandfather never could shake the memories

Of hunger, and loss, and struggle

Where I'm from my grandmother buried her father at 5

She remembered how cold the floors were in their rented room

And why they never needed closets

Because a hook on a wall was sufficient 

Where I'm from I feel the history of the town

I love the lighted trees on Broad Street that now is for relaxation

That was once the center of commerce

Where cotton dust filled the air as it was shipped down stream 

And the Cotton Block is now something where the city has a block party

Where I'm from keeps me connected to my past

And allows me to enjoy the beauty of my future.

In doing my poem I know I stuck mainly to the location aspect of where I am from, but at the same time, I connect deeply to those places.  I mostly connect so deeply because of the history that my family takes up in this town.  If you ever read Rick Bragg then that is the type of story telling I am used to, minus the drunks being in my family, they were cousins and such.  I would have to say I am affirming the story of the South.  I think history is important especially family history.  

Online Participation

#ENGCHAT Experience:

I engaged in an #engchat on October 22 and I found it a lot of fun.  I liked having the ability to quickly converse and hope into conversations with fellow teachers from all over the country.  What I liked about this is the ability to move between conversations quickly.  There are a lot of ideas being brought up, links being shared, and basic sharing of information.  #Literacies November 1, is a planned chat and on this date is on Digital Peer Review, I intend to lurk on this one only as they are really asking experienced teachers about their own peer reviewing processes, however I hope to take away a good deal of information and some ideas on what I could include in my own class.



Link to Article with Comment:
http://rn-t.com/pages/full_story/push?content_instance=20579611&need_to_add=true&id=20579611#cb_post_comment_20579611

Personal Learning Network

I have learned a great deal about personal learning networks and how they work from Rheingold.  I think it is fairly obvious to say that we, as people, need supportive people around us to encourage and to be able to bounce ideas off of and to learn from.  My network is currently small as a pre-service teacher, but I do see the importance of adding to this network in a greater way.  Not only in learning to be a better English teacher at the high school level or any other level I may venture into, but in general.  I put an emphasis on my strong network ties rather than weaker ones at first (although this is so small it is hard to tell that is what took place), yet Rheingold made a good valid point that a vast number of weaker ties are important as well.  They in fact are the best way to create more diverse learning and to foster innovation.

Talk about Demotivating!  There are few things that demotivate me more than knowing there is no point in saving for the future when so much money is printed my money is worthless the longer I hold on to it!  =(   

Truthful Movie Poster

I loved this assignment, I really loved seeing what everyone else put up.  It was fun and thought provoking.

This is a project I want to do with my students in the future, sans the foul language.  I think this teaches students that they have to truly think of why a movie is made, the audience is is searching for, and the purpose of the movie itself.  I would also like to link this together with a "book poster" idea.  Having students create a poster or cover with the truthful spin allows students to voice their own opinion on the book.  I know a lot of kids loved the Twilight series, while an entire other group hated the books (I would be in the later of the two groups).  Having these visual projects allows for creativity in a multitude of ways both from the visual and in the usage of words in the project.

Collaboration

Collaboration is something we all do, daily, whether it is in a learning environment, in the work place, or simply being a member of society.  What I found to be the most profound ideas in Rheingold was not the idea of how much we collaborate on a daily basis, I think that is fairly well understood, but rather collaboration in terms of human evolution.  I will honestly say I was taken aback by this notion that human evolution should be looked at through the eyes of collaboration rather than the survival of the fittest manner in which I have always viewed evolution.  The idea that the human brain correlates directly with how we are social seems as though it could be questionable, then it is followed up by the fact that as humans we can work in groups of up to around 148 people, which is roughly the size of a military unit.  It may be that is it simply chance or it could be that the US Military finds credibility in this idea or that they in fact found the same to be true independent or new studies and theories.  I also enjoyed the fact that gossiping was the first form of language... I think it justifies my long conversations with my girlfriends since it has always been that way.  =)