Playbook: Playbook entry 1 September 3, 2014 No child left behind, needs highly qualified teachers which means that teachers have to have their master’s degree. Some school districts help with paying for the master’s program. Within the textbooks that you will have to become an “expert teacher” you need to learn the new ways to teacher, which is now scientifically based and then from there change slightly the way you will teach the children. Teachers are trying their best to teach the same way maybe another district will teach but they are becoming more consistent. For example, when I was in middle school my woodshop teacher Mr. Long would pull out the No Child Left Behind Act, book and read us what he was supposed to do. But the woodshop teacher with a lisp would then toss it aside and say, “in my day we didn’t need this, why pull you along and change the way I teach.” Of course no one ever replied, but trying to get this man to get his bachelors in 2001, was a difficult task for old school teachers that didn’t believe in the act. After we talked about teachers trying to become experts we moved on to System of Knowledge. This system was to see if reteaching the students that got answers wrong was a good idea or even helpful. But there was one point that the kids found a breaking point. The grades, the understanding of the course materials went crashing down. This breaking point was long division, if you don’t follow the steps, from multiplication, subtraction and even alignment and if you missed one then the answer will be wrong. Just because you understand one step of long division doesn’t necessarily mean that you will come to understand, you need to understand every aspect of this skill set. You can lose your confidence, which I have firsthand experience at this feeling of I am so bad at this, or me saying to my parents, “Why bother, I am just going to fail anyways.” It was a downward spiral of low self-esteem and not trying because you just feel like it isn’t worth it. But having teachers seeing these mistakes and asking question to the students to see if they comprehend, what went wrong to break them of the habit of continuing of getting long division wrong. As the teacher you have to see what is going on and not ignoring the problem, it may suck to go back and redo what you thought the student understood but at the end of the day when it clicks for them and they finally feel confident again it is an awesome feeling. That’s not all we talked about, but we talked about descriptive data, like ethnography which are events and understanding the events and how they are important in people’s lives. Surveys can be qualitative or quantitative research, qualitative is quality of what you know and descriptive, quantitative is numbers. But the surveys in qualitative for example is when you write about how your professor did during the semester. But the other side of that is the quantitative is the bubble part of one being bad and five being awesome. So every time I have sat in a classroom and the principal came in and watched she would tally the times the class I was in would act out which is qualitative research but when she writes down that the student was upset over whatever would be quantitative, this research method is participant observation. When the student is bad enough the principal would go into a case study which would collect every bit of information about this student and ask for surveys from the parents and even the bus driver.
Chapter 2, Playbook entry 2, September 8, 2014 Brain development, involves different parts of your brain to develop at different speeds at different parts of your life. When you are a toddler trying to walk and move around you look more like you had too much to drink at the bar then anything. This function for balance and learning is the cerebellum. The hippocampus has major effect on learning and this is to help you recall new information and experiences by using this