Thursday, June 16, 2011

Chapter 8

There were two areas that popped out at me in this chapter, the first being the statement: Questions, then, are like computers or television or stehoscopes.....they are mechanisms that give direction to our thoughts, generate new ideas...... (This statement comes from the 1st sentence in paragraph 2 of Technopoly.)  While reading this I realized why I should continue to question my students throughout our time together in all subject areas.  Questioning brings out a higher level of thinking, no matter what topic we are discussing.  I definitely never considered them to be a type of technology, but now I can see how it is causing my students to grow in their knowledge and thought process.

The second are that I was drawn to was how  statistics are used in the "measurement" of intelligence (p. 130, paragraph 2, Technopoly)  I am seeing many schools leading themselves towards cluster grouping of their students.  How do they do this?  Greatly used the standardized scores and test that are given throughout the year.  I am sure that some of the teacher's opinion goes into this placement as well, but these scores weigh heavily.  Do not get me wrong, I believe that as a teacher I should be teaching to all levels within my classroom and differentiating material as needed, but I question if the clustering of students is the right way to go?  Do you think that this gives the students a label, just like the IQ or SAT score, that the student is not associated with?

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