Photo: A Special Halloween Moment, Scarecrows at our school October 31, 2007Before I begin sharing the specific social justice based math units that I used in my classroom I'd like to share a little more about my school, classroom, and students. Since one of the most important tenants of Action Research is that it is based on context, I want to make my context come alive for you, my readers.
First of all, my school is very small. We have about 30 students. Officially we have two teachers, but thanks to a grant from the National Park Service we have scraped together enough money to afford a third teacher-that's me! We are located in a National Park and, for that matter, right in the middle of arguably one of the most beautiful places on earth. The views from our classroom windows and the school yard are world class.
All of my students' parents work for the park in one way or another. Most of them either work for the concessionaire or for the National Park Service. Nearly all of my students live in housing provided by the park, and no one can own a house in the "town" where the school is. This results in our socioeconomic demographic being very middle class. No one is particularly rich or poor when they live and work in the park. Most of the parents are very involved in their children's education and enjoy helping out at the school.
Our students have many opportunities because of our location. We get to go skiing for free all ski season, every other Wednesday-the whole school goes and it becomes our primary P.E. program for that part of the year. We also have special environmental education programs that are created just for the park schools so that our students can get to know their own park.
The class I was teaching during my AR project, the 6th-8th graders, was the oldest at the school and they go on a trip every three years to Scotland-to visit the town John Muir was born in. My students were preparing for this amazing trip as I completed my AR project with them.
We are also a distinguished school with a fairly high API and we have a lot of fun, freedom, and ability to teach in the way we believe is best within each of our wonderful classrooms. It was a pretty spectacular place to complete my AR project and continues to be a delightful place to work every day.
6 comments:
As the world is quite aware, we are in a bit of a financial crisis. The financial bail out added up to an AMAZING $700,000,000,000.oo.
Oh my goodness!
Besides the naughty Wall-Street people and CEOs, who lined their pockets which profits and bonuses,as they packaged and resold mortgages time and time again, and speculated with them on the world market, another "factor" which contributed to the demise of our financial system, as we knew it was SUB-PRIME loans.
Many of these loans were given to people, many of them minorities, who desired to own their homes, but did not, in reality have the means to pay the mortgages when balloon payments had to be made and interest rates went up after a certain amount of time
Their loans were packaged in such a way to make them possible, but in the end, they were extremely risky for the consumer.
If we did a break down of the people losing their homes right now (which incidently many people invested all of their savings in) because of the kooky unscrupulous loans which were drawn up, I wonder how many of those homeowners would be from minority groups? How many would be first time homeowners? How many of them had to put down down payments? Which consumers in the market are the true victims of social injustice?
There were many advocates, who had great intentions, many pundits say it was these advocates, in the name of social justice, who basically "strong-armed" banks and other lending institutions into giving loans and therefore homes, and part of the American Dream, to those who, in the past, would not have had access to it.
Since your action research project connects social justice and math, I was wondering how you might approach this real-world situation with your students? It's a fascinating time.
There is a line from the movie, Nicholas Nickelby (sp?), based on the book by Dickens, and, this is not a direct quote, but they said after Nicholas's father went broke due to speculation, something like, " 500 Nobodies lost everything, and fifty somebodies bought villas in Italy."
There is a precarious balance in this world. In this mathematical and moral dilemma, it is difficult to know on whom to place the blame: the lenders, the social activists, or the consumers.
It would be an interesting problem to look at. I mean, I wonder how many of those consumers could be helped with if the bail out money were used to "redefine their loans"...I think that is what is going to be done. This is probably a really BIG problem to talk about with your grade levels,but it surely has all the makings of a Social Justice Based Math lesson/inquiry.
Wow...I didn't realize that your school was so small. Hello.. Sking for P.E....NICE!!!
The view from your classroom window is...WOW!!!
The U.S. Financial Crisis is definitely a great area to study in a mathematics course today. It is affecting everyone in some form or another. Those who have lots of cash of course will keep the market alive by consuming "the 50 villas in Italy," while the have-nots and the have-less, will have to scrape up a living find decent living arrangements and provide health care coverage that was cut during the ongoing budget situation.
I'd like to pick your brain a little more about how you prepared and implemented your unit. While under the spell of inspiration, I just wrote a huge blog entry concerning curriculum planning. I know that it takes time, but it also works best through collaboration! I'm having a difficult time teaching math this year because I'm just following the script. Judging my students' response to my lessons, the need for change is obvious and immediate. Your unit helped your students become engaged learners, I'd like to replicate similar results in my class. Thanks for the inspiration!
The more I learn about your school the better it sounds. That picture from your classroom was pretty astounding. When I grew up in Montana I also got to go skiing for PE in the winter once a week. I didn't really appreciate as much as I should have because now I only get to go a couple times each winter.
I think it's great that you get so much flexibility. At my school there are a lot of combo classes this year but because we are a program improvement district and we are reading first we do not have much flexibility and my coworkers are struggling to try to teach two curricula each day.
It's interesting to read these blogs and see how even though there are only about 20 of us in this program that we have such different lives. It provides a lot of learning opportunities.
Ish,
I'm not sure I can do justice to your question here. But I promise I will go into the specifics of my curriculum planning in my next post. It was a large task last year, but worth it. Ironically, I'm now teaching a new grade and we adopted new math curriculum so this year I feel less flexible. I'm also trying to teach 3 math lessons in 1 hour and 20 minutes! It makes it harder to improvise and create exciting new curriculum when time is such a factor. I miss it though and hope that next year, assuming I'm in the same position, that I'll feel more free to experiment again. Anyhow, I'm not ignoring your question. I promise to answer it thoroughly in a post very soon.
Teacher-preacher,
I've actually been thinking a lot about how a lesson on the current financial melt down would look. Unfortunately, I'm now teaching 3rd-5th instead of 6th-7th (last year) and I don't think it's as appropriate for my new grade level as for my old. I would have loved to address it with the 6th-8th graders this year. They would have loved it too. And, wow, you're right there are major social justice implications. I'm both unsurprised by the financial crisis and shocked that so many in power are seemingly surprised. It would be fascinating to look deeper with a group of students. There are so many days when I leap for joy to be with the 3rd-5th graders-they are nicknamed the "Dream Team" because they are such an overall fantastic group of students, but sometimes I still miss my fiery junior high students. Maybe I'll suggest it to their current teacher since they enjoyed the social justice based math units so much last year.
Thanks for the spectacular thoughts.
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