Chapter 4 does a great job at explaining and breaking down intelligence among students as well addressing the topic of special education. Woolfolk mentions the different definitions of intelligence which really started to make me think about what intelligence really meant (p.148). To be quiet honest my general idea of intelligence was the second one mentioned in the paragraph, "the total knowledge a person has acquired" (p. 148). Reading deeper into the chapter about Gardner and Sternberg was a fascinating as I never saw intelligence in the way they explained it. Learning and thinking styles in my opinion can make or break a student and the research in the chapter supports a similar relationship. Speaking of learning and thinking styles, it really tied in well with the rest of the chapter in regards to students with learning challenges and students who are talented/gifted. Chapter 4 does very in depth regarding students with learning challenges and really shed a light for me about how to deal with all the varieties of issues.
Chapter 5 really hit home for me because I didn't know English until I started Kindergarten. I grew in a Polish household where both parents spoke Polish about 95% of the time because my dad didn't speak very good English. Heading into school knowing no English was a complete shock to me because no one really spoke it in my house other than my mom and brother and they only spoke Polish to me. Once I started to make friends in school the cultural differences were also astonishing to me. Everything I saw and did in school was like a whole new world to me that I had never been exposed to before. I caught on pretty quickly and lost my accent early on so by the time I was about half way through grade school no one really knew that English was my second language. The drastic difference in learning described in Chapter 5 for ELL students really surprised me and made me realize how fortunate I was to learn English at such a young age.
Tying into Chapter 5 with language diversity, Chapter 6 does a significant job and explaining culture and diversity in a classroom. When Woolfolk defined culture as a program for living that opened up my mind to see culture as a whole new topic (p. 236). It made me realize that culture was more than just a language or a way a person acts. It was the way you lived, your everyday. It made me truly appreciate my roots and the way I saw things. Chapter 6 also touched on racism which I think has become a huge problem in schools today. Before kids even realize it they start to hang out with their "clique" of friends as they get older as opposed to when they were kids and they didn't even think twice about such matters.
Chapter 8 was a crazy chapter to read, I had to reread certain passages more than once to fully grasp what they were talking about. I found the chapter to be very interesting (once I understood it haha) and informative on the topic of cognition and memory. My favorite part of the chapter was at the end when Woolfolk began to discus basic principles and teaching methods to help ensure knowledge was developed.
Mat, your blog was interesting. That is amazing that you had an opportunity to be bilingual with your parents. This chapter also made me think a lot about culture and how to apply lessons in the classroom with the different culture you may have in your class.
ReplyDeleteMat, I defiantly agree with you about the importance of culture inside of the classroom as well as the school as a whole. I think the topic of racism and group "clique" dynamics will be important to our future education careers because like you said, it rarely is a problem in children but as they age, in addition with the increasingly divisive society we live in today, I could see these issues becoming more prevalent in the future and we must be aware of them to hopefully manage them and stop them before they are issues.
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