Last Child in the Woods

I really enjoyed reading "Last Child in the Woods." The book is about how this generation of children are diagnosed with nature-deficit disorder and how to help them become more aware of the nature. This book really made me think about my childhood and what I did to be out in the nature. I feel like these days children just always want to stay inside and watch t.v. or play video games, instead of going outside and making a tree house or maybe kicking around a ball. Children really need to get outdoors and experience what it has to offer. In the long run children will be happier they went outside and enjoyed the nature. My group in Ed Psych used this book to do an I-movie presentation. Here is the link to go and watch our amazing video!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ovJCZr-cgg

My group worked really well with each other. We had some complications in the beginning with the taping and getting a video camera, but once we got that we were set to go. We had a lot of different ideas that we all put together to make one great I-movie. We made the video so that there was enough pictures and videos. We did not really want to have us in front of the camera just speaking to everyone because we thought that would get to be really boring. So we showed pictures and videos and then spoke behind those pictures. We also had music going behind our pictures so no one would get bored just looking at the pictures. The music really made our video! I thought that it worked really well.

This project was very fun to do. I really like working with my group. We bonded very well. I feel like our presentation was very good and we worked really hard to get it be that good. I really liked how we had to show our creative side for this I-movie.

Overall, I thought our presentation went well when we presented it. The class asked us a lot of questions after our presentation, which makes me think they were really interested in our video to think about questions to ask us. It was really fun to see our end result of our I=movie. I thought there was also a lot of other good I-movies too. I also really enjoyed the book. I really like how it was set up. There was a lot of good information to receive about nature-deficit disorder. I really think my generation took the time to get out in the nature. Now a days parents need to get their children outdoors to experience what the nature has to offer!

Teaching Abroad in Singapore

At the beginning of the year I attended a presentation on teaching abroad. The speaker was very good. He made me very interested in teaching abroad. I never really thought about it because I do not like to go very far away, but he made me feel like I would feel right at home teaching there. Singapore is an English speaking country so for me or other English speaking people to go there it would fit me or them nicely. You would not have to learn another language to go and teach abroad.

I really liked how he talked about how inspiring the children are at Singapore. He made the students seem like they wanted to come to class everyday and learn more and more. He also made the point that there is a lot of hands on activities, which is very good. I really think that hands on activities helps students learn a lot better. These students have the confidence and motivation to learn everyday. I like to see students that are excited to come to class and are ready to learn. Those that are not are even harder to get to particpate and learn.

The speaker also talked about other oversees programs. He made it seem very easy to teach abroad. He said it is a very good experience for every new teacher. Teaching abroad gives teachers a better understanding how different people learn. You get to see learning in the eyes of someone different than yourself. He also talked a lot about how teachers that are abroad get a lot of good money. They also give money for housing.

I feel that if I were to teach abroad, I would learn many new things. I would have to learn the different sports that people use in Singapore or wherever I went. That could probably be a task at first. Once I had the idea of the new sports, I could finally teach them to the students. I also feel like different cultures have very different ways of doing physical education. It may be hard to stick with the plan they have. I really think it would be very fun and interesting to teach abroad though, and learn new things that I have never learned before.

Adolescent Brain and Alcohol Presentation

Very, very interesting presentation! First of all the presenter was very enthusiastic and very fond of what she was researching. She had a lot of different voices and made the presentation more enjoyable than I was expecting. She made a brain presentation really fun to watch. Her power point had a lot of interesting tools and different kinds of animations that made her presentation even better.

Even though her presenting was very well done, her information was also very good. She had a lot of good information that will help college students in the future. She talked a lot about how the brain develops and how we should act to keep our brains in the best shape it can be in.

One thing she really addressed was that alcohol kills brain cells. When a healthy brain learns a new task, it shows a lot of activity, which is what we want to see throughout the teen years. When people drink alcohol the brain slows down a lot. Alcohol is a suppressant drug; it slows-down brain activity throughout the brain. In the teen brain, the Hippocampus and PFC are altered, making it hard to learn and form new memories for a long time. Because it is the formation of new memories that develop us, problems don't show up right away. Alcoholism increases the younger a person starts using it. Teens are 5 times more at risk of having alcoholism. Research shows that during adolescence the brain is changing at such a rapid pace that any interruption in brain activity can have major consequences. The faster the brain is supposed to be going, the more interruptions cost, because it is NOT mature. The teen brain is more vunerable to toxins. Teen brains are so vunerable to addiction that the NIDA has declared alcoholism and other addictions to be developmental diseases, the risks are reduced as a person gets older.

The presenter also showed us a table of brains where it showed how the brain develops. The more yellow and red a brain is the less developed it is. When the brain is purple and blue it has matured and developed. The parts of the brain for safe driving develop last. The basic hand-eye coordination needed to drive develops in childhood, but the parts devoted to expanded attention and focus, judgment, identifying risks and forecasting consequences, risk management, and the complex visual-spatial calculations needed to drive safely develop in late teens and early 20s.

Overall the presentation was very well done. I learned a lot about the brain that I did not know before. There are so many changes that can happen to a brain that I am so amazed by. I did not know that the brain did all of those things.

High Stakes Community School

-Shows the estimated Net drop out rate-
In the High Stakes Community School I was one of the Drop out Coordinators. As a Drop out Coordinator I did not agree with the proposal. Many of the proposals account for many requirements that the students have to meet. This in turn makes kids who are less smart and capable to achieve these things to stay on task and focus on getting to the requirement level. They have to work much more harder to achieve these goals. If these students cannot stay up with the high achievers they are going to want to drop out of school because they are going to be stressed they cannot do it.
I agree that something needs to be done so that even the high achiever students are able to achieve at a higher level than they are already at. This does not mean that everyone has to raise their level of smartness. Some kids are not able to get to the level that the high achievers are at. I really think that the proposal should make the requirements a little less harsh. Students may get scared that they are going to have to be the best all the time and they won't be able to do that and end up dropping out.
The drop outs are going to be the students that are not as smart and cannot keep up with the standards and requirements. It is also going to be the high achieving students that are getting too stressed about doing homework all the time to keep up with the requirements.
This proposal overall is going to make kids very stressed. It may help them get better, but it may also hurt them. Not every student is the same. There needs to be something done that helps all types of people not just the high achievers.

What Makes Finnish Kids so Smart?

I really enjoyed reading the article "What Makes Finnish Kids so Smart?" It really made me thinkg about the United States and what we are doing with the education program. Finland students are among the smartest in the world. Americans finished among the World's C students. This shows that Finland teachers, educators must be doing something that America needs to get started on.

Sometimes I think that the U.S. pressures students to be really smart instead of letting them figure that out by themselves. The U.S. needs to reduce the standards on some things, so that children/ teenagers can experience more things and enjoy them while they are at it instead of hating it and not even trying to understand what they are doing. Children/teenagers do not always listen because a lot of the stuff they think they do not need to know. I feel this needs to be further analyzed because students should be able to have power of some of the things they are learning and be able to teach themselves how to do it instead of teachers always getting on them for not doing it right or having it due in a short amount of time.

Finnish students are able to have more free time and are not always hastled by teachers. The teachers also do not assign that much homework "high school students rarely get more than half-hour of homework a night." This means that Finland teachers are giving students some free time to experience things on their own and are not giving them any pressure to get things done in a quick amount of time.

Finland students do not have to deal with a lot of technology either. They do not have to worry about the stress that some U.S. students do about figuring out how to use technology. They also are not wasting their time on the internet searching Facebook or playing games. Technology in America is very important though. I agree with the U.S. that students should learn how to use it because in every day America they are going to be using it. I do not agree with children/teenagers being on the computer 24/7 checking their email and playing online games though. This makes children/teenagers less social and less focused on what's happening in the real world.

Overall, I really enjoyed this article because I now realize that America needs to do a better job of educating children and young adults. I feel that sometimes the U.S. needs to communicate with other countries and listen to what the other countries have to say about their program and what is working best for them, so that every country can become better and have smarter students all around.

Doan Van Dieu, Ph. D

I really enjoyed the presentation tonight by Doan Van Dieu, a Ph. D at Ho Chi Minh University in Vietnam. He works in the Department of Psychology Education. He talked about the viewpoints on Family and Relationships in the family. He really made me think about my future as a wife and how to prepare myself to be a good mother. I did not know that marriage was a big part in Vietnamese lives. He talked a lot about how American women are very scared to get married. I took that as Vietnam people just get married all the time and do not really think about the possibilites of the person not being their person they are meant to be with. I think American's do have a lot of divorces but they think more about what they are doing with their lives than do Vietnamese people. Maybe that is just me though! I feel like I need my parents approval and my friends to know exactly that I want to marry this person. Most Vietnamese people want approval from their parents and also their friends, so there is a similarity in marriages between Vietnam and America.

Many of the Vietnam's accustoms are very different than they are from here in America though. An example would be that they believe they should have a son so that they can inherit the descent. Also, there are not many divorces, but it has increased since 1913. In 1913 there were on 2 divorces and in 2000 it increased to 2,000. This is very different than American style way of living. There are many divorces in America. Vietnam values family very, very, very much! They put a lot of time and effort into keeping their family close. I feel they also communicate to each other with respect and do not have to deal with fighting as much as Americans do.

Vietnamese people also appreciate education very much! Parents really want their children to be successful in their studies. That is the number one thing that parents expect from their children. I feel that in America education is very important too. I would have never thought that in Vietnam they appreciatd education as much as America does. I feel like America really emphasizes education, so that children can live a happy life and be able to live in the real world. The number one thing that chidren think their parent's expect is to show respect to their parents and show that they love and care for them. Sometimes I think that children in America take their parents for granted. They do not know how much their parents do for them and in turn treat them very badly or like sommeone their age. Children in America need to realize that parents are very important and they need to keep very good contact to them.

I was very interested into what Doan was saying. He did not speak very clearly, but I understood what he was saying. He made Vietnam people seem very different than Americans. He emphasized how much family and marriage means to Vietnamese. I really enjoyed his presentation!

Chalk

I really enjoyed watching Chalk. At first I was a little confused on why these teachers were acting this way, but I caught on and noticed that it was supposed to be like that. I realized that teachers do really have a hard job. It is not easy to just make up a plan and teach it. You have to go over what you are doing before you can actual teach it or you will make yourself look stupid as did one of the teachers. He was really sarcastic and told the students to not be as smart as him so that he looked good in front of the class. I feel that since it was the first year for some of the teachers, it was probably pretty hard. They didn't understand the teaching curriculum and all they wanted was the students to like them. They did not really know how to teach. They just kinda threw stuff together and taught whatever. I also kind of felt bad for these teachers because they did not have a clue what to do. They were mean to the kids, but all they wanted to do was be a good teacher. They really tried hard to be great, but it just was not for them. This movie gave me some insight on what to look for when I become a teacher, and what not to do because it is not allowed. These teachers have a lot to work on before they become a real teacher.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwyLP6KKPKE