All posts by Xueying Lu

Being a middle school teacher is not easy

Creating Classroom Community

“As a middle level teacher you will need:
– A sense of humor that you share with students regularly
– Flexibility that you demonstrate in your instructional curricular planning and delivery. “
Brown & Knowles (2007) You want to be a What?

These characteristics of middle level teachers really speak to me because I completely agree with these statement. I have spent a lot of time teaching middle school students English and American history. The key issue I found with adolescents is that they are very easily to be distracted, the average length for them to focus on a subject is not as stable as adults. For teachers, having a good sense of humor could easily amuse students and be popular among them. Therefore, it’s more likely to manipulate them to obey your order.

Secondly, adolescents cannot complete follow your expected routine. Adolescence is a period of time with exploring spirit, courage, and disobedience, so flexibility of pedagogical approaches is crucial to reach out students. Rigidly asking them to follow direction would only stimulate them to act more violently against us. Also, using various ways to reach students can help teaches, as well as students themselves, to better know their potential.

Drugs change the fairness of taking tests

Reaching Adolescents and How to Respond

“New drugs to improve memory and cognitive performance are under intense study and testing on people impaired by brain deficiencies. The possibility of their use on healthy adults, let alone adolescents, trigger debate from the laboratory to the legislature.”
– Philip (2006) Drugs that enhance student achievement in engaging tween and teens.

Using drugs to boost testing score in the US might be new to some people, but to a student who survived from extreme high-stake tests in Asia, it’s just a quite common and acceptable phenomenon to me. The general public’s attitude towards college entrance test pushes it up to prominent position that this once-a-year test can decide your entire life. If a test really could decide your future salary, achievement or even social status, I bet no one would reject a little help from any possible sources. As a result, cram schools and private tutoring, along with drugs that are said to boost memory, flourish in Asia. Some parents and students believe in the advertisements said and constantly take these kinds of medicine, hoping to get better grades in tests. Even though I seriously doubt the effectiveness of these drugs, I still want to try them sometimes in case they really work. However, I heard that most of these drugs are not effective because the main ingredients are vitamins, so basically they only provide you with what you could get from a balanced diet. If there really is a medicine that could make you score higher, like Modafinil in the Article, using the drug can be considered a kind of cheating. First of all, using drugs makes students perform better than their real proficiency level. The test would lose its credibility of evaluating students’ performance. Secondly, not every student could afford the drug. It’s unfair for students who do not take the drugs.

Also, I am considering that using drugs to boost performance may gradually change students’ attitude towards test. Since they can take several pills to help their score, there is no need to study hard. If a student get a high testing score with the help of drugs, it is unfair for others who study diligently.

Last but not least, the side effects of these drugs have not been studied yet. It is possible that taking drugs cause mental damage in a long term.

thick desire

Friendship, Love, & Sexuality, Urban Adolescents

“The correlation of drop out and teen pregnancy is particularly high for young women with mental retardation. Academic failure and leaving school prior to graduation are strong predictors of early pregnancy (Rousso, 2001).” Fine, 2006

I am pretty shocked when reading this finding, but it seems pretty true. When students drop out from school, they start their lives in the real society. Since lack of sexuality education from school, they are more likely to commit sexual behaviors without protection, which leads to a high rate of early pregnancy. Also, once drop out, custody from parents and teachers is missing, teenagers are more likely to be motivated by their “thick desire” to explore sexuality, which has not been fully discussed and explained in schools. I agree with Fine that the current sexuality education in school has an uneven impact on girls, youth of color, teens with disabilities, and LGBTs. Current sexual education in school does not teach girls how to view sexuality critically and equally. Instead, it leads girls to be more curious about sexuality.

School is a very important place for teenagers, so it should act as a main portal for students to build up a critical view of sexuality.

Queer Pedagogy in schools – still a long way to go

Gender Socialization & Identities, Urban Adolescents

“At no point in my transition at my school has my primary concern been for my safety or my feelings. I am an adult with all of the resources I could ever want, including a lifetime of learning how to self-advocate and the protection of employment nondiscrimination policy in New York City.”
Krywanczyk (2009 ) There are transsexuals in our middle schools.

Since I neither have any experience about the queer pedagogical approaches used in American schools, nor encounter any transsexual people in my life, I feel that it might be difficult for me to provide any novice thoughts on this topic. Even though I have a close friend, who is gay, he and I seldom talk about his sexuality because I thought it’s not respectful. From social media, magazines and some books, I get to know only very little about their struggles, in terms of how they identify themselves and how the society identify them. I know some of them are trying very hard to fight against the social stereotypes, and use their own stories to encourage others, just like Mr. Loren Krywanczyk. Mr. Loren Krywanczyk used his personal experience to set up a good example for those LGBTQs, who are still fighting to earn respect and acceptance from family and society. He is an adult now, and is strong enough to resist the pressure from society, but, what I concern is, is it a good idea to have people like him to lead the queer pedagogy in school? I understand Mr. Krywanczyk’s story is very inspiring, but each person is facing different situation. Every LGBTQ have peculiar reasons to hold them back from coming out. Boldly implementing his approach might neglect the individual difference. I agree that the current queer pedagogy in school is not complete, but advocating Mr. Krywanczyk would only lead to students’ misunderstanding and parents’ confuse. Considering the mental characteristic of adolescences, they are fragile and sensitive, which might lead them to be exaggerated about this issue.

Teacher Modeling is one major cause of social bias

Newcomers & Perpetual Foreigners, Urban Adolescents

“As education scholars, we cannot continue to allow poor and working-class students and other underrepresented groups and our families to struggle alone against the hegemonic designs of U.S. public school.” Prieto, The sting of social hierarchies.

In this article, Prieto wrote about her personal experiences and feelings of being an immigrant kid, which are really touching to read. She is from minority group and working-class, who has to take the burden of sharing family responsibility at a young age. Plus, his family members are resisting American culture, and avoid her from getting involve in American society. All of these factors add up the difficulties for her to adjust to the US culture. The article was published 10 years ago, and right now the cognition of constructing multi-culture educational setting has been accepted by more and more schools and educators. But, we still couldn’t deny that there are still kids and family, especially the “poor and working-class”, are struggling to fight with social bias in and out of schools. In my opinion, schools and teachers could play important roles to redirect this trend. School is the primary environment for immigrant kids to contact American cultures. If teachers could form a classroom culture to appreciate the contributions of working-class, and foster a positive view toward the immigration groups, students can model their teachers and gradually redirect their previous bias on different social classes. Currently, especially during recent years, schools have put more attention on multi-culture learning environment. And, more and more educators are joining to fight against the “hegemonic designs of U.S. public schools”. Hopefully, more students from poor and working-class could find out a better way to define themselves and face future challenges positively.