For this week we read the book It’s Not About Grit. In the first two chapters, it talks about poverty and some examples to show poverty in African American and Latino families. Poverty, a critical issue that exists in every single country. From my perspective, poverty is not only referring to the impoverished neighborhoods and suffering from daily life, but I think it also can refer to poor grades, instances of aggression, and other social problems, like selling drugs. There is an example of a 14 years old boy sells drugs. He was unaware that he was selling drugs. He just thought he was watching the mailbox and giving out little brown bags. He just follows what other people in a certain environment(prison). Many people do that, and he wants to have a sense of feeling of belonging. I think he must do something wrong then got catch and stayed in jail. The jail is the place that he is supposed to rethink and regret. However, the entire environment does not allow him to do that. In order to survive, he needs to know how to integrate into the prison circle and how to get along with people in the prison. I am wondering what can the prison really educate people? When a crime or similar problems happen, is the jail the better place to go? And how can people really get rid of poverty? My answer is education. When people are educated, they know how to find a better job and feed themselves well, they know how to behave well. Through education, we can decrease the unemployment rate.
All posts by Paris Huang
WeChat Critique: WeChat is not only about Chatting.
Recent years, WeChat, a cross-platform instant messaging service created by Tencent in Shenzhen, China, has become the most popular social media platform for Chinese people to use. Over 1000 million people spend over hours on WeChat daily. WeChat is a multifunctional social media tool that brings convenience to people’s life.
Firstly, WeChat is similar to other popular social media platforms, which offer people a space to share and express opinions, videos, pictures in public but only those people you are friends with. You can follow some public pages that provide educational information, such as some free online courses and meaningful articles, which benefits people. Take myself as an example, I took a three month GRE courses on WeChat, which was very good assistance for me to pass the test. We watched some videos about how to solve math problems on the WeChat platform. The teacher gave us homework to practice. What is more, WeChat allows people to create a group to study together too, the maximum number is 500 people; it also provides a chance for people to have multi-people video talk. Additionally, you can learn many things on WeChat and you can find almost every information you need on it. For example, you want to learn about Chinese Spring Festival Culture and how do Chinese people celebrate the Spring Festival in China, then you can go to search for videos of how Chinese celebrate the Spring Festival and its history on those relative topic pages. I personally believe that the educational function on WeChat is effective for people to learn and get improved in certain areas.
Secondly, WeChat has become one of the most popular online payment tool, which brings lots of conveniences for people. It is easy to link your Bank accounts and cards to WeChat account then people can use WeChat payment to order airplane tickets and hotels, pay bills, taxis, shopping mall, pets caring, even little street food vendors, it is easy to pay via WeChat by scanning the WeChat Code. Well, honestly, Mobile payment service is everywhere in China.
Of course, WeChat fundamentally is an instant service that connects people, WeChat gives people more security and safety because it asks people the exactly ID number of the target person when you want to add or befriend with, however, in Facebook, you only need to know his or her name and can find him by searching his full name. Additionally, nobody else can your posts unless you “allow strangers to see at most ten posts”; you can also set how much of posts in timetable can be viewed by public, for example, you can set “only the recent three-days posts can be viewed by people”, “only the recent six-months posts can be viewed by people” and “all posts can be viewed by people”.
However, WeChat has some disadvantages especially for people who are crazy about posting videos. At the “Moment” section, the place people share and express their feelings and opinions in public, it does not allow posting a video that is longer than ten seconds, which is not always convenient for those adolescents who love sharing their selfie videos frequently. Also, WeChat payment only supports using Chinese dollars as the only currency; even though the range of usage and acceptance has reached to European countries and many American countries, people need to consider about the exchange rate from the Chinese dollars to the target currency. when they are using WeChat payment.
MVP # 8: How to make Curriculum Integration more benefical to a range of students; and how does traditional curricular designed classroom benefit students?
When I start writing this MVP, I think the most interesting point is the curriculum integration. There are many benefits that curriculum integration can provide for students: engage in learning ideas that are meaningful to their lives; make significant connections between ideas they study and their lives; learn concepts and principles at a developmentally appropriate level; participate in democratic decision making that affects the daily classroom, etc. It also mentioned that students themselves can engage in the decision of making curriculum integration. “Student-designed is true CI as defined by ultimate curricular decision making by students ”(P195 Middle-Grade Research Journal Vol.6, No. 4, 2011). Then I have questions. What is the standard to exam students and courses when adding more different levels of people to decide the new curriculum? All Students have different and similar backgrounds. So how do we decide what types of students can join into designing curriculum?
The article also mentioned one interesting point is that “many classrooms have become less progressive in their curricular design than in previous decades”, which can refer to the traditional curricular designed classroom. I experienced the very traditional curricular designed classroom when I was studying in China. I think the traditional curricular designed has the explicit learning and teaching goals, and the benefits are more obvious reflected on the exam scores, which is the most direct way to see how is the students level and what percent of the knowledge he has mastered from class. And the traditional curricular designed classroom can definitely meet the high schools need because high school students have more exams for entering into higher education level.
How do we deal with the autonomy in media use?
For this MVP, I would like to talk about the media use in-school and out-of-school.
“One aspect of the in-school and out-of-school divide is about availability and acceptance of media technologies”. Media technologies are common use in-school because it brings lots of convenience to studies. Media technologies can support students to learn knowledge from visual videos and news. However, children are mostly using media technologies like Ipad and cell phone to have entertainments. Children spend most of the time on playing games or watching video games or chatting with friends on smartphones, which occupies a great time of the day and impact their studies. So in some cases, children are not allowed to use media technologies in schools. So how do we deal with the autonomy in media use? Things children can get from media devices are different from things parents and teachers can get from. So how do parents and teachers enter the worlds of their children and know what are their children thinking about?
how do different elements play role in the development of students’ learning process?
I love this article because it mentioned many matters I am interested in, such as school cultures, classroom sizes, teacher-student relationships, and classroom emotional climate.
School cultures is an essential element for choosing a school. I think a school culture can reflect how this school looks like, whether it is diverse or not, can the school accept my culture? And the study atmosphere can be linked to the school culture as well. One of my previous First Grade class had over 16 different backgrounds students. 16 different cultural backgrounds students were siting in the same classroom and studying, how interesting! It was exciting and diverse to see how different cultures and people to solve the same problems.
As classroom size, I would like to say, as small as we can be better for students and teachers because having smaller size classroom would allow the teacher to build a better relationship with students. If the teacher has a large size classroom, then she might not be able to help every single child because the time and energy are limited. Having a small size classroom would also support building a happy classroom emotional climate, especially for a kindergarten class.
Parents also play a significant role in the process of their children’ studying. Sometimes, some kids are behinds other kids in class, these kids do not care about their study, and their parents do not care either no matter how many times the teacher talk to the parents. At the beginning, parents might not see it as a big deal because their children are too small or they are just in kindergarten level, however, the more kids learn, they more they are behind than others, gradually, these kids would lose their confidence to learn, they even do not want to go to school because they are not confident in studying and their scores on exams are always very low.
“The concept of the culture of the school and the fact that different schools, like different communities, vary in their interpersonal moral and academic cultures, have been central to our understanding of school effects on adolescent development ”(P229, Schools as developmental contexts during adolescence).