Thank you again for helping me whenever I needed help. And the final teacher who is one of my most favorite teachers is Mrs. Cox. Mrs. Cox ever since I came into middle school, you have helped me with my grades and other things. You are a great teacher to me. I want to thank you because you helped me with so many things in school.
I felt superior over the other kids even though we all struggle at the same thing I knew sooner or later I will be able to speak normal without my accent yet I will still be smarter at the end. I felt that I did not need to master English I just needed to know enough to make it through life. This feeling grew inside me and became worse when I was in middle school. In my first year in middle school my English teacher told the class how everyone will be required to take the Scholastic Reading Counts program. The program was designed to encourage reading, students go to the school library and select books to read that have a green sticker on the front.
Chris Street wrote an original research article, “Expository Text and Middle School Students: Some Lessons Learned”, and tells us that middle school students face difficulty reading expository texts because they were not taught how to read in this fashion while in elementary school. While in elementary school, they read short novels and chapter books, whereas, in middle school they are expected to read content area text. According to this article, teachers can help their middle school students overcome reading deficiencies by developing a student’s former knowledge on a subject before reading it. Street provides very good strategies on how to engage students with expository text, which consists of: before reading, during reading, and after reading. Before reading strategies include developing
First, his teachers have made a nonverbal promise to students by showing up that they will do anything in their power to teach and to make sure that they comprehend the lesson. Second, he comments that many of his classmates have no desire to learn and were notorious to slack off from doing homework that were assigned from teachers. Finally, he stood out to Ken Harvey, who asked for an opinion about working hard to reach achievement, saying that “he wanted to be average.” Rose questions himself why he wanted to be average and how crazy it is in school years. Rose concludes that he is intelligent in his educational ways of being an average person by being forced to sit in a classroom without anyone challenging him to be a successful learner. Although Mike Roses’ learning experience paid off, students are responsible for doing assigned work and finding ways to understand what they are being taught by teachers with higher standards.
The effects of NCLB affected everyone, whether you were at the top of your class or toward the bottom. To those of us who experienced the affects if NCLB first hand, it seemed like the students who put in the least amount of effort got rewarded the same things that the students putting in hours of work got. I asked my good friend Casey Collins, who attends University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, if she felt that NCLB was affective she said, “In all seriousness it was passed to help those who were behind get back on their feet, but it never took into account why all of these students were doing poorly in the first place. It's not effective in the fact that these kids are now moving forward but still don’t have the knowledge to do so. It also holds back the kids who work hard to succeed.” Many of the people I asked agreed in some way with Casey.
School has to suck because it needs “... to teach children the self-discipline and responsibility they will need to survive in the real world as productive adults.” Both these traits are key to have as adults and need to be pushed upon students during their school career. Teachers also need to “...hold him accountable for his own work and behaviour.” If a student gets a bad grade they can only blame themselves for it. Once before in math class I failed a test and could only blame myself because I knew what I could and couldn't do. I then pushed myself to study and get more help. I'd rather get a failing grade that I earned, than a “no-zero” because of a policy.
The Political Science program even helped me succeed in my schools AP course because it prepared me for future topics that I would eventually learn and most importantly the AP exam. Throughout the year I kept completing all the intricate assignments and by doing so I feel that challenging myself has benefited me for the future that awaits me. Before AP History I felt unaccomplished and that school was too easy. I used to complete my assignments and feel spiritless. The course made me realize that college wouldn't be cinch.
Dante Larry The start of my writing career was the 7th grade. The 7th grade was an easy year for me work was slightly hard my teacher Mrs. McPherson was a nice lady who was kind of gullible when it came to her students. In her class test were always in order something I was not proud of was when I was in middle school I would cheat on everything and anything possible. My writing experience came into play the middle of 7th grade when papers and book reports were expected by my teacher. Once the papers started to come in my life started getting harder in school I tried anything to get out of writing essays and short stories.
Today, children view school as a “place of danger”, and their main focus is to avoid danger as much as possible (Holt 360). This danger comes in the form of mistakes on tests, quizzes, and homework assignments in which the children earn grades based on what they are able to remember at that time, instead of making a long-term connection between the educational content and the children’s own distinct method of learning. Teachers, despite their best intentions, diminish the children’s will to read when they conform to these “conventional” methods of teaching. These methods have made a game, between the teachers and students, out of learning to read; a game in which the students are to guess what the teachers want to hear and to agree with the conclusions the teachers draw. This gives children the impression that reading is dangerous, because they don’t want to make mistakes and lose the game.
At first my mother did what she needed to do, like try to help me get an education. After a while, I believe she got sick of doing it. That’s when my brother and I just walked around until she decided to put us in a public school. We were so excited about going to a real school, rather than home school. Yes, you may have a one on one thing at home, no bulling, and all the other stuff that goes on at school, but it’s not worth it if the person teaching doesn’t care.