PLN 15

In the article "School would be great if it wasn't for students" by Alfie Kohn, it states that instead of blaming teachers for students failing, we need to start blaming the students. I think this is important to me and to education, because it's not always the student’s fault that they are failing. Sometimes the teachers don't go over what the student needs to know enough or they somehow give a student false information, causing the student to fail. Or in every school a lot of students are failing, because not every student is getting the opportunity to choose what they want to be educated in. I think this matters to society, because if we educate these students in what articulate paths that they want to take, we could help out the world and the economy much more efficiently. If we start focusing on what the kids and students want to have as professions, I believe that it would be better for us.

RyanL2014

(I posted this kind of late so sorry about that)Today in Smith's class we didn't do much. We started out going over what we will be doing, and I happened to get Monday. We got our vocab word, malevolent. This word is do Friday so make sure you get that done. After the vocab fun we did some very exciting class room reading with chapter fourteen I believe. If you missed this chapter I would try to get that done because we will be reading sixteen through eighteen pretty quick. We also were told to finish PLN12 and to try to have PLNs 8-12 done. Those Google Earth entries that you are all having so much fun with will be due on Monday of next week so remember to get those completed as well.

Scribe

On October 11, 2010 (the day after my birthday) there was no music playing for the third day in a row. KJ, Jake and jack were all late again. Mrs. Smith told us to pull out our assignment notebook and write down our homework which was just do all your make up work like PLNs and use the vocab word philanthropist on PLN9 and Philosopher in PLN11. Get caught up on GE entries 1-7. Also smith wants all of us (except Connor because he got an A) to come in and see her to re-do our short story essay. She wants us to write a letter to our parents about parent teacher conferences and print it out and turn it in to her. The letter consists of look at participation, growth in writing, and comprehension. She wants us to tell where we want to be at the end of the semester, how we are going to get there and what can she do to help us achieve our goal. She gave us all about 15-20 minutes to complete the letter. After the letter we pulled out our copies of “Into The Wild” and we read part of chapter 11 and the homework was to read the rest of the chapter. Then all of a sudden the bell rang and we finally got out of our first class on a fall Monday morning.

In the video "2020 Vision" by Karl Fisch he explains what he thinks will happen in 2020 what matters from this is if this is all correct then if one company owns everything bad things might come out of it because they might control everything in the world. In his video he thinks that companies will buy other companies until their all owned by one person. This matters to me because if this happens to me in the future then I will have no chance of getting more successful in life. This matters to education because all of the kids have their own laptops so they can be more efficient but it might over load the Internet at Arapahoe and there will be technical difficulties. This matters to the world because everything will all be controlled by Google and there will be no way for somebody else to gain control. To conclude 2020 will be a future that one company owns everything.

Scribe for 10-7-10

We come in on a fall morning, with Smith greeting us at the door.  Strangely, there was no music.  First Smith told everybody to take out there planner to write down our homework which is to catch up on all the GE entries (1-7), annotations, finish diagram for Into The Wild, PLN presentations for those who have them, and short essay redo.  Smith recommends going to writing lab on your nearest off hour to get it done and turn it in.  After we went over homework, we took out Into the Wild and read and annotated chapter 8.  Then we read “Higher Laws 2” by ourselves first and came up with some interesting points to make about what was said and what questions we had.  After that, we listened to the song “Long Nights”. Some connections to the characters that ventured out into the wild was that they were all trying to change to become different people, that they were all trying to become spiritually strong, and that McCandless specifically didn’t seem afraid of anything, and that was the feel that you got from this song.  We ended the class by Smith telling us to pack up and the bell rings.

Scribe 10/6/10

          Class started out caliginous today, with no music playing, the weather was cloudy with a chance of rain; many people were late to class which made Mrs. Smith very upset, and most of us were playing the flight simulator on Google Earth. After that we went over our homework our agenda, which was reviewing our vocab word philosopher. Today we learned it means someone that loves to ask questions, and that the antonym is realist. Then we rearranged our desks into a circle to read and discusse chapter 8 of Into the Wild. The main point we talked about today was if the characters we read about, all were idiots that just killed themselves in Alaska. Our homework for Thursday is PLN 9 and 10, vocab card which is Philosopher, Google Earth entries one through seven, and short story easy redo. I just hope that tomorrow will be a better day than the one today.

Smith Home page

Scribe: October 4, 2010

On Monday we got our new vocab card and the word is philosopher. In class we read "Into The Wild" chapter 6. We will not be reading chapter 5. Homework is GE entry 6 and use the vocab word. To redo the short story essay you must go to Smith or to the writing lab.

Scribe: October 1, 2010

In class today Mrs. Smith started off with telling us to get out our agendas and told us about our homework over the weakened and most people grunted in dismay. Next, we kicked it off with going over how our Google earth posts are going to look like after we do them over the weakened. After that, we started watching classmates do PLN presentations. One of the presentations about columbine shooting and I got pretty emotional, great presentation that got my attention. Next, she put a passage up on the screen and we had to read it and tell connections we had with it.  Lastly, we listened to music and talked about it.