Barb Rentenbach

I was so overwhelmed after coming out of the lecture. It's so easy for me to assume that autistic people who can't express themselves are obviously not smart enough to write, understand humor, and form their own thoughts. Barb completely blew me out of the water in the way that she could see respond to our questions pretty fast and with humor. I was impressed that she is determined and has a lot to say about autism. I could think that when teaching to the autistic population, the teaching doesn't really matter because they are going to probably never be able to find a job etc. But I came to realize after the lecture that education is for everybody and that knowledge is a gift that I can give to someone as their teacher.

Her caretaker Lois was very inspiring to me also. I learned from her patience is a huge key in working with this unique but great population. She took the time over the last 15 years to find out exactly what ticks Barb off, how to best utilize the facilitated typing and love her as a person. I want to see all my students as people with real needs and real desires. She has stood by her step by step through her writing of the book, getting her to the point where she can leave self sufficiently and getting her everything that Barb herself wants (like a hottie trainer as she said. ha) This really opened my eyes to the potential that this population can have and never to shut them out or anybody out due to a disability.

Group Discussion-Gender

This article was about gender awareness basically. How does one address gender issues? It is not good enough to be gender neutral because at times we need to be aware of gender. The author really is passionate about sex equality especially in relation to the way girls have been treated through time unfairly. I at times did not agree with the author but I don’t really know why. It almost rubbed me the wrong way that she was making these huge generalizations but I didn’t really know where her material was coming from. In her notes, she said she benefitted from conversations with all these people but they were all girls. I wish that she would have had some male opinions to throw in there to make it less biased. Everything she said made sense but I know tons of girls who are totally opposite of what she was describing. I also know guys who are not vocal and assertive. I think girls are becoming more confident in talking out and expressing their opinions.  In short, I think she does have a good point in saying that we cannot be completely gender blind because that doesn’t get rid of the innate problems of the differences between boys and girls. We do need to be gender aware to a point where that we create equality in the classroom. I as a teacher want to be completely 100 percent equal to all my students not looking at them differently based on race, gender, class, grade in my class, or past actions. I was really surprised when she said that even when teachers think they are being fair they are only showing the girls about 34 percent of the attention. I wonder how reliable that is. How do you even test that? As a teacher, even when the boys are upset with the way that I am addressing the girls (as in too much in their opinions), how do I maintain good classroom conduct that changes because the boys are upset? Do I deal with an learning environment that doesn’t stimulate learning for anybody because the conduct is so bad and go about being fair or do I keep oppressing girls to have a good learning environment?

QTC Number 10

One of your 4th grade female students is very well developed physically and looks as if she is 15 instead of 9 years of age. Today you heard a group of 5th grade boys commenting on her body in a lewd and humiliating manner. Two other teachers also heard these comments but blew them off as "boys will be boys," and "she needs to get used to it." 

Considering teacher ethics and responsibilities, describe how you might respond to and handle this situation. 

 As a teacher, I have a responsibility to protect my students and also to lead my students into appropriate behavior. I would first address those teaches and explain to them that the reason that boys are going to boys is because no one has ever taught them how to respect a lady. By accepting disrespect from our students towards other students, we don't even deserve them to respect us. Explain to the teachers that if the fourth grade girl were to overhear this or find out someone was talking about them, she could really be affected by their words negatively. She could develop body image issues and this could completely affecting her developing social skills and she won't be able to relate to other people based on this. I as a female do not know how appropriate it is for me as a teacher to talk to the boys about this. I don't understand the way boys minds work. If I had a male colleague, I would approach him and have him discuss with the boys why this is inappropriate and disrespectful. He will be better able to address the boys because he as a boy understands.

Battle of the Brains

This was a very entertaining documentary about intelligence. By examining intellect from seven very intellectual people who all excel in their category, we can see a broad range if intellect is overall, just in our field, or maybe in something similar to what we focus on. I was surprised by how fun the quantum physicist was. He seemed to me the whole through (and later was confirmed at the end) to excel in all the categories. He was goofy and fun and to me creative and humble.

I was kind of surprised that the dramatist came out on top in the end. Also that no one figured out the bottle riddle. Seven of the most intellectual people in the world couldn't come up with an answer to that one. I don't think I really learned much about intellect because a lot of the stuff that was discussed we had just talked about in class. Overall the conclusions I drew from the movie were that honestly I believe that people with a high intellect are overall going to do well in most categories. People with average intellect will just excel in their one category.

Overall, I think the biggest thing I got from this is people learn in different ways and excel in different ways. One of the coolest thing was that classroom that assigns what they are good at and let's them do activities that will help them learn the best. It might not be that extreme in my classroom but I need to alter different learning activities to reach all children's intellect.

Questions

1. What is lower order thinking?  higher order thinking?

2. In your classroom, both types of thinking will need to be cultivated in your students. What are some strategies that a teacher can use to foster both lower order thinking and higher order thinking?

post seven

Social cognitive theory is the idea that students learn and acquire knowledge by observing others and replicating what they see in other's actions. Constructivist theory is one where the student only gains knowledge by adding to previous knowledge that is already known by the student. As a teacher, I want my students to be able to express themselves in writing. Constructivist theory falls short in this category because if the student doesn't know how to write well when coming in how does he build on that. Social cognitive theory states that the student can mirror what he sees. As a teacher, I will write a lot and read a lot to my students and hopefully they can emulate a certain structure or ideas that are presented to become better writers.

Behaviorism vs Social Cognitive Theory

When teaching, there are many different ways to evaluate if students are learning. Two of these theories are behaviorist and social cognitive. Behaviorist theory believes that the behavior that a student displays shows whether or not he has mastered the material. The way that students learn is the result of stimuli in the environment and that is best accomplished when close together. In my classroom, I will have objectives. If I were teaching a class on fractions, the only way to know if they mastered it were to examine how they react to fractions in behavior. The stimulus could be the fraction put in front of them and the response of how they attempted to solve the fraction problem would be the behavior.

In the social cognitive theory, people are effected by watching other people. As a teacher, I would be the biggest example to my students of presenting the material that needed to be mastered. So much that you teach your students is not taught in a book but learned just through social interactions. If I wanted to see if my students had mastered certain social skills, I would show them what I believed to be good behaviors. The social cognitive view says that good behaviors would be retained while behaviors that lead to bad consequences will be discarded. I would hope that after modeling what I wanted, I would expect them to perform what I wanted to show that they had mastered it. They would see me do cursive handwriting and then practicing and performing I could see if they mastered it.