education system

            The education system for majority of the community schools fail to play their role to support students and lead them to success. Students are asked expected to learn a max amount of material in a limited amount of time without given the time to elaborate on each topic. Everyday students go to school mainly to get an education and from this hopefully live a good future. They are taught and told everyday that if they do not do well at school now, it will not be easier later. We are taught in a way that the system thinks is more efficient, but never consider the students opinion. With this, we are expected to enjoy and attend class on a daily basis and pass all the testes given to us. That's where it gets complicated, we are taught in way where teachers just transfer all this information to us and ever consider if we actually understand it. Students start to feel as if their education is not important and that school just is not for them. This causes all the absences and drop outs in high school. Neither the less, let's not forget about how the students feel. Many students become afraid. They are afraid to speak up and say what is on their mind and express their feelings. Trying to attract students to being more into school and more teachable you have to hear them out and try to understand the ways of their learning ability.

The system that we are taught in is the "Banking" system. In this system teachers are passing on information that they are told to teach us and having is remember it without having us really understand the material. In the Pedagogy of the Oppressed it defines the meaning of the “Banking” system and it states, “Education thus becomes an act of the depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of the communication, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat” (Freire1). Students are really not learning by this system because are only obligated to remember this material for a certain amount of time, for example they are only going to remember it until the day of the exam. After this exam they their memory of this topic would be forgotten and this happens over and over again. Students have learned to just memorize the material instead of actually putting it in their daily lives and actually making relations with the information. In addition, the result of the “Banking” system is not great. In a quote by Baldwin he states, “Although society is under the obligation to educate all of its citizens, it is also under the obligation to discourage people from educating them to think too much....” To me this quote is trying to say that we are all asked to go to school and learn something, but at the same time school is not actually teaching us much. It is teaching us that we should listen to what others are trying to teach us, but it is not showing is how to apply it to our daily live. It is not preparing students to stand up on their own and be able to problem solve by themselves. A student identified as Jeff Bliss expressed his feelings toward the way his teacher teaches by telling her this, “Hearing this freaking lady go off on kids, ‘cause they don’t freaking get this crap? If you would just get up an’ teach ‘em instead of handing ‘em freaking packets, yo. There’s kids in here that don’t learn like that. They need to learn face to face. You’re just getting mad because im pointing out the obvious.”  In this incident this student was asked to leave the classroom by his teacher and he tells her how he feels about her teacher. He described her teaching as just handing out packets, this is caught my attention because it reminds me of the banking system. Being given a packet to do in class is not going to help the students. This just gives them a chance to copy to get their work down and get a grade for it to make sure they pass the class. That does not insure the teacher that the students are actually learning the material because they are only asked to find the answers and not given the reason to why that should be the answer to the certain questions given to them.

            The system that should be used to teach students is the problem-posing system. In this system it is a teacher-student and student-teacher based process. Where the teacher and the student are both learning, and not only the teacher.  In the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it explains the meaning of problem-posing as, “The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own” (Freire7). With this the students should be comfortable with having a one on one conversation with the teacher. Instead of the teacher talking and just spilling everything he or she knows, this gives the students to give their way of understanding certain concepts. This allows the students to be heard and for them to ask for help if it is needed. Students should not just be sitting in class taking notes and memorizing everything given to them, instead they should be able to take the information that was given to them and apply it their lives. See how certain topics relate to their lives and how it may affect them.

            Another reason to why our education system is not working well is because of the lack of connection. Students usually feel lost of connection with their teachers because they sometimes feel as if their teachers do not understand their way of thinking. In the clip, “I Teach my Neighbor’s Kids,” Jeff Andrede Duncan talks about teachers being able to “Over Stand.” Over Standing is being able to teach the material by connecting the students. Making connections with student’s lives and the material being taught to them will help them understand it better. Connecting something that is not that interesting to something that is common and well known to people will get everyone to interact, which will have the whole group to speak up. This makes learning more efficient because students will feel as if their teacher will understand what they are talking about. In the same clip, Dr. Duncan talks about living in the same neighborhood as his students help with connecting with them because he knows everything that is going on around the area. He shared that he has witnessed a death right in front of his house and that sometimes some certain noise or word can trigger a flash back to that incident and can cause him to blank out and forget what he was talking about. He shared this because he wanted to explain that not only do students blank out and forget what they were talking about, but also he a teacher does, too. Being able to share the same stories with your students will help with connecting with them because this will make students feel comfortable with you. When students are comfortable with their teachers it makes it easier for them to speak up, ask questions, and to express themselves without worry about what others make think of them. The lost of connection in a classroom does not help with the learning environment, but when connection is there lesson may move smoothing because then everyone will be involved.

            Our education system fails to encourage its students to be active. Instead students feel like school is just a competition. With competition running through the students mind, this can result to isolation from others. This is brought up in the video “Recycling the gift: The Passion Project II,” the narrator brings up the birth of competition. She states, “Assumptions about competition plague our thoughts. We think we must isolate our growth, but the systems of life never create anything in isolation” (pg2). This explains why we isolate ourselves from others. We grow up to thing that isolation is the key to being successful because we try to compete with others.

Recycling the Gift

In the documentary "Recycling the Gift: The Passion Project II," it talks about how  students should be learning in the school enviorment. It tries to put the word out there for everyone who struggles after leaving high school and is expected to be  ready to enter the "real" world. She use the opinion of other people to prove that the way of how we are taught in high school is not enough for the teachers to say that we are ready.There were many things that caught my attention and things I agreed with, but most of all things that I can relate with.

Something's that caught my attention were the things that Jeff Duncan was saying. When he said, "It's not a factory; it's not an institution; it's not a public service; it's a community" (Duncan2). This caught my attention because I liked how he compared school as a factory. Schools should  not be compared as factories because it shows that schools are places where they just throw stuff at you and expect you to be able to do it just to get work done. Another thing that caught my eye was when he said, "...education is the process by which people learn first, to understand themselves, their own value, their own historical place in the world. But if you try to fit them as widgets in a current economic set of needs, it's ridiculous" (Duncan5). This caught my eye because it is something school should be about. Schools should make they're lesson about something that they can abapt to, something they can relate to so that it would be easier for them understand. I left like Jeff Duncan had a lot of really good things to say. He made it easier for me understand they argument because they way his mind thought was more based on how he feels the learning enviorment is like. 

In this documentary the narrator talks about shallow memorization. This is basically how students get throught high school. Something I can relate to because as a student I never really allowed myself to learn the curriculum because I only cared about passing the test. So what I would do was I would study the night before and he say of and try to remember all the answers to a test and the vocabulary just so I can pass the test. Shallow memorization is used a lot with students I believe because it is usually the easy way out. Tim Grudin talks about not being engaged results in not learning anything, "A lot of people aren't engaged, and a lot, I think there's a lot of learning that doesn't happen because of that" (Grudin7). I agree with this because if the students are not engaged, that means that the students are not paying attention. Which comes back to not being able to relate the lessons. Being able to relate to the topics or the work helps students remember and come back to that topic later on. Well at least to me it would be easier because if it can bring back a memory from my own life it would make everyone easier because then I can always think back and recapture that moment. 

Something that is big to me the the enviorment I am in while learning. I find it hard to learn in an enviorment where I am scared of the people I am around. "There's no dialogue going on between the student and the teacher. So, the student just knows that they are going to ask their question, and the teacher is going to say what it is, and that's going to be it" (Neikirk7). This is how I feel like my whole schools life was like. Where I would sit in class and listen and do the work and hopefully pass the class with what I was able to get from what the teacher has said or taught to me. Never did I like having a one on one conversation with the teacher because I didn't want the whole class to listen. Now I know that that wasn't the right what of learning because this whole time I was learning through the banking system. 

This documentary made a lot of sense to me. This explained how students struggle later on in life because it talks about all the problems the teaching system has. Many people do not complain but this is how we do not learn. Because we are afraid to speak up and ask questions.