Yes We Can - Changing our early childhood education

I found the entire article fascinating because so often I hear about how it is the families fault for not speaking English or not doing their part, but this article is examining other aspect of failure that we, as teachers, can change. It was also nice to see the article site examples of success within schools with high minority and low income populations, because the media is always focused on how bad some of these schools are doing and not on the schools in the same situation who are making the changes and succeeding in getting their kids to read, do math, and graduate.

The part of the article that I was most interested in though, was the part that talked about the decifict in pre-k that many children are a part of. Too many people do not realize how critical early childhood education is and that is evident in the fact that the people who teach this age get even less respect, less pay, and less acknowledgement then teachers do, and we all know teachers aren't highly respected either. I have seen and discussed this issue a lot while I took some early childhood ed. classes at Uconn and while I worked at a daycare in a preschool program this summer. The program I worked at had a secondary history teacher as the head teacher. This is ridiculous to me because secondary majors have no classes in child development and are trained in a much different age group. This is sadly a problem in many programs. People are hiring anyone with a degree to be a teacher to this young kids for the most crucial learning time in their lives and they sadly being given much less of an education than kids at preschools with more qualified teachers. I often wonder why Neag doesn't have early childhood ed. as part of its program considering how important those early years are to students development. In the article they talk about how this is one major difference that disadvantaged students are facing and there is not enough being done to compensate. While programs like Head Start are meant to help disadvantaged children, I have met numerous people who have worked in this program who can attest to the unqualified nature of the teachers who are supposed to be getting these kids ready for school.

Preschool is costly, but critical and I think that if we are to send all kids to school on an equal playing field regardless of class, race, or ethnicity than we need to have high quality preschools with highly qualified teachers that are available to all kids. Until that happens I think that the deficit entering kindergarten will continue to be large between low income and higher income families and it will continue to be hard to overcome.

Teaching Science

My most recent experience in science was student teaching and unit I did on the states of matter. This was the first subject I took over and I was the most nervous to do this because my scientific past has been inadequate and traumatizing. It was very uncomfortable for me to be in front of the class trying to teach them something that I feel like I never really learned to the full capacity. It is also uncomfortable knowing that I may not know all the answers no matter how hard I prepared. I used to think that I had to know all the answers in teaching science concepts. I used to think that I had to be a science expert on everything. I used to think that science only came from books and pictures. I also used to think that kids didn't like science, because in my experiences kids didn't have good role models for how to teach science. I realized, though, that I can take what was a negative for me and turn it around for my kids so it would be a positive. I realized that I can learn with my kids and experience a whole new science as both a teacher and a lifelong learner. I learned how important it was for me to connect the science concepts I needed to teach to what they were curious about. It was amazing to see the kinds of questions that 8 year-olds have. They loved science and I, inturn, loved teaching it. I realized that teaching and learning are whatever you make them and as a teacher I have the power to invigorate science in the eyes of my students.