VIPS Visit

On Friday December 4th, I went to my elementary school like I always do. When I woke up in the morning, I felt horrible, I had a cough, sniffy nose and my ears were clogged so right away, I thought great I'm not feeling well but I decided to go anways because I have missed two times already from being sick and I didnt have a fever so I went. On the way there I was really dragging. So I got in there and I signed in and went to my classroom and reading intervention started and I noticed that I had a new group of students. So I introduced myself and the students told me their names and then I just kind of sat there because I really didn't know what do to. I could feel myself heating up and I was just out of it. So we started to play the games/activites and the first game we went through right away, they knew bascially everything. Then I took out the next game and there was no materials for it. The different activites had no materials for me to use so we could not do the activity correctly. I just kind of looked at them and said okay lets play a game of Guess Who? and thats is what we played for the rest of the time. I would tell them that the word that I am thinking of begins with the sound "ssss" and shines up in sky and they would guess what I was thinking. When I left to go to my first grade classroom I felt really bad. I felt like I didn't do what I was susposed to do and the students that I had in my group were not the students that I have ever had before so they did not know how outgoing I ususally am, because we did not have fun or at least I did not have fun. It was like a VIPS day gone bad :(

Empowering Education*

"Participation is the most important place to begin because student involvement is low in traditional classrooms and because action is essential to gain knowledge and develop intelligence. Piaget insisted on the relation of action to knowing: "Knowledge is derived from action...to know an object is to act upon it and to transform it....to know is therefore to assimilate reality into structures of transformation and these are the structures that intelligence constructs as a direct extension of our actions" (1979,28-29)
I agree with this because, I think that when students participate in the classrooms they will really understand the material better because they will have a visual of what is going on. Some students don't like to participate, but in the long run the students learn better when they do participate with all of the other students.

"It is a student-centered program for multicultural democracy in school and society. It approaches individual growth as an active, cooperative and social process, because the self and society create each other. Human beings do not invent themselves in a vacuum, and society cannot be made unless people create it together. The goals to this pedagogy are to relate personal growth to public life by developing strong skills, academic knowledge, habits of inquiry, and critical curiosity about society, power, inequality and change."
I also agree with this quote as well. Society isn't a society if there isn't people in it, and we the people make up a society all together, and each person puts in their differences. People and society intertwine.

"Situated, multicultural pedagogy increases the chance that students will feel ownership in their education and reduces the conditions that produce their alienation"....."But participation is a means, not an end, in this program for empowering education. There is a challenging goal to the participatory process I am suggesting: to discover the limits and resources for changing self and society"
Students that have a foreign language as their first language come into schools and already feel alienated because they don't speak the language that everyone else is speaking. If teachers bring the language into the classroom then the students wouldn't feel so alienated and they would feel welcomed and want to participate instead of not wanting to talk at all.