Survey response

The survey was interesting. It asked very personal questions and I believe it will help out us students in the future. How is it helping us? Well if people have trouble with transportation or financially, PSU will prob make some adjustments to help out those who struggle getting on campus or to pay for transportation. This survey may also let PSU know and realize that maybe raising the tuition isnt a really great idea because we all know college is expensive. But again, laying out information from students will give a better understanding of students who attend it and how hard it may be just to be here twice a week, three times a week, or everyday of the week.

Plato

Plato
To reflect upon this reading, it has a lot to do with today’s society. Whether it’s through media or religions, we now today strive to live better. As an example such as Christians, they are wanted to be accepted to heaven. They want to live in a good environment after death. Christians fear the fact that they will be sent to hell rather than the peaceful heaven. Everyday people live with sin, sin sometime just come their way.
It is interesting to me how it explains in the story how if a man tried to struggle to get free it would just suffer more and it was a sin. It also explains how these drawing or paintings on the walls spoke to them and how you can see the shadow. The beliefs from these people through their religion allow them to suffer. In so many different aspects, if the prisoners were to look at the light they would become blind and not able to see they would look away. Therefore, to comfort themselves in the suffering pain in the cave, they imagine their own story with closed eyes. Here it quotes “I think that he would suffer than anything than entertain the false notions and live in this miserable manner.” These prisoners were actually never to see or experience the realities of the real world.

John Her

LE GUIN

after reading some of these posts it was brought to my attention that coyote was a person. for whatever reason i was thinking it was some sort of wolf or animal.
another interesting thing in this story is that animals and humans are both "people" which is different from our society. it seems to be suggesting that we are similar to them, and they can talk so it gets confusing. i enjoyed the story because of how out of the ordinary it is. its challenging us to think past the norm and consider animals and humans coexisting together in a little town. Coyote is suggested as being crazy and the fact that she talks to her poop pretty much clarifys that. she acts like they are her children. this is another thing that makes this story weird, along with the fact that this little child with one eye can comprehend any of what has happened to her.

Quinn P.

Gatto RR

Reflecting upon the readings we have discussed thus far, Gatto’s article where he talks about his opinion in which he believes our education system is crippling our kids, was a stance that I agree with for the most part. His opinion of encouraging the best qualities out of our students youthfulness, such as helping them use their natural qualities of curiosity, intrigue and their sense of adventure and adapt into our schooling system contrary to what is in place now . His suggestion of offering more flexibility and being able find the natural path of insight for each individual student wouldn’t just help our students become more fully rounded adults but also help them become more integrated in our society with the education they received.

I was really struck by his opposition of Ingles’ 6 functions, especially the selective function in which it discusses how the school systems application to “the favored races.” Where students are sorted into certain branches creating an inferiority, which then translated into the jobs they have options for, and is a fundamental force in what drives our economy. Instead of using alternative methods in helping the students who are tagged unfit find their niche, in learning things that are crucial to their respective personalities and ideas. But instead these students become neglected and tainted with poor grades, that doesn’t help advance who they are as people but instead giving them a leftover role of our socio-economic structure which only benefits those that weren’t subjected from the very beginning of their education as well as other external factors.

Personally, I agree with a lot of Gatto’s points because it highlights the main issues with our education system. When I was in Middle school, most teachers taught class in a traditional textbook format, but in one class, all of the assignments where open ended and designed to create an environment where critical thought and reflective discussion where more important and overshadowed the sorting functions of grades and tests. As I look back on my time in that class I see that I learned a lot more valuable information not only about the material but as well as myself , opposed to the more the traditionally taught classes that where much more frequent in my k-12 public school life.

Chris L.

"Against School" Reading Response

I love to read. I always have. I read boring things and interesting things, things I remember and mostly things I forget. Lately, I read a lot of critical things- about the government and its leaders. I’ve learned to scan over those oh-so-prevalent expressions of opinion and form my own hypothesis based on what I already know and see. But somehow Gatto’s article “Against School” struck me differently than the rants on the back page of the weekly alternative newspaper. I found myself so excited by the points he was making, so surprised to find that someone, somewhere, had put into words what I had somehow suspected to be true all along, that I nearly emailed the article to my family and friends. I still might.

That sounds geeky, I know, but it has to do with how I was raised. Due to my health, I was unable to attend public school until grade eight, at which time I myself begged my parents to let me enroll. Up until that point, my brother and I were “homeschooled” or at least that’s what we learned to call it. We rarely did anything at all which resembled the arbitrary notion of school most our peers and their parents referred to. We played outside, we read random passages out of encyclopedias for fun, we watched OPB and we cooked with our mom. We were read to at night and slept in as late as we wanted in the morning. It was hardly an ideal environment for fostering intelligence. And to be sure, when I finally entered Junior High at thirteen with no notion whatsoever of how to factor equations, I felt stupid. But I also had experiences much more valuable than the kids around me. I wasn’t used to holding my teachers in near religious reverence, so we related on a more human level. I had never before been punished for getting up to relieve myself without permission and it seemed dehumanizing. And finally, the phenomenon of being “too smart” or “over achieving” would have seemed nearly comical had it not come with so much stigma.

Gatto’s article addressed all these areas and many more. From briefly looking over some of the other responses to this essay, I can tell it was not generally well received. But that seems to prove exactly Gatto’s point. Most children who are taken through a compulsory schooling and spit out, after 12 years, at a point where they can finally choose what they learn and how they learn it, are wholly unprepared to think of their education as anything but obligatory. Having worked very hard myself to get back into school, but not having a classical history in the school system, I can see how “critical thinking”- the type of processes encouraged in higher education but rarely in a mandatory schooling, is key to becoming an educated and well rounded person. But it can only be achieved after the method of thought we have learned from our k-12 education has been abandoned. I don’t think Gatto is really “against school”. I think he is simply against dogmatic thought and its propagation in America’s public school systems. But his point was made and it, incidentally, made me very glad indeed to be back in school at all.

Kate S.

Gatto

I loved Gatto's idea, saying that we dont need school to be educated and showed many people from history who were successful without going to school. I completely support that idea, because i do believe a person can be successful and can survive without school. That we can educate ourselves. There so many things that i taught myself that i didn't learn from teachers.

istar Abu

Buffalo Gals

This story is amazing because its makes you wonder if animals would show so much kindness to a human, and it is also unbelievable how a little girl would lay next to a coyote, and not be scaried. There was one point in the story where the coyote explains to the Gal that there were only two kinds of people, and tells the child that the first people were animals, children etc. I that the coyote was inferring that the animals where the first people created. I do believe that animals were created first before humans. But i wouldn't call animals people though. I liked this story because, i loved the sensivity of the animals. And i do think that some animals a kind.

istar Abu