FNED 346 Blog

After looking at the RI Department of Education’s website, finding the school that I volunteer at and seeing the statistics I was not surprised by the numbers presented. Inside the classrooms, the kindergarten teachers are in charge of 25+ students with one aid coming in and out of the classroom. The website says that the student to teacher ratio in the elementary school is 1:18 while statewide it is 1:13. I have been in Mrs.C’s classroom for two weeks now, but when she was absent this week and I went into Mrs.D’s classroom a third of the class was split up, so when we went into room 107 there were around 30 kids in the room. Even with the help of the teacher, her aid, my friend and I, it wasn’t enough to keep the kids calm. For the two hours and change that we were there for the students were being disciplined for acting out hitting, throwing, talking, and just behaving badly. The decorations in Mrs.C’s room are decorated with five rules that the students all have memorized if yo...

Rodriguez “In an instant, they agreed to give up the language (the sounds) that had revealed and accentuated our family’s closeness.” To help their children Rodriguez’s parents agreed to try to incorporate more English into their daily life. By doing so they accidentally divided their family due to a language barrier. They did understand English but could not use that language to emphasize how they really felt as well as they could with Spanish. “The family’s quiet was partly due to the fact that, as we children learned more and more English, we shared fewer and fewer words with our parents.” The closeness that the family once shared is now gone because in trying to help their children they also lose the bong that they shared with them. The author tells that if neighbors were not over hanging out with the children then the house was silent. Without the proper words to communicate how you really feel, and parents who do not speak a language you fully understand the f...

I was placed at an Elementary School in Providence Rhode Island through Inspiring Minds. I felt fairly confident in my performance because I make lesson plans all summer for the swim courses that I offer for kids from ages six months to adulthood. Upon going I tried to make sure I knew my way around but my GPS automatically entered in Broadway street instead of Broad street, so my partner and I were a few minutes late. Walking into the building we were a little lost but then pressed the buzzer and entered the main office straight ahead.  The office was small and there was a sink with a bathroom mirror on it makes me believe that the room wasn’t supposed to be used as an office. I know that the school was made with a lot of love through the help of the Alan Shawn Feinstein association which does amazing work to benefit education. I asked the lady at the front desk where Mrs.Corrado’s room was and she gave us directions and said it was in room 105. We walked up the stairs and open...

This author Jonathan Kozol in "Amazing Grace" argues that poor communities in America are being taken advantage of because they can't do anything about it. Looking at what Kozol observed while in Mott Haven put into perspective how bad the balance of power has gotten in this country. These ghetto neighborhoods are overlooked and seen as a hopeless case so those with the tools to help think why to bother to help. Everyone in the town of St. Ann's has to deal with their own set of problems such as illness. Asthma is the most common illness in St. Ann's for children. AIDS and drug use is also spread throughout the town. With people being sick though they do not have the funds to pay their medical bills. When they go to the hospital to get the treatment they are either refused or wait days in triage with other sick or injured people. Options for health care are also terrible where people have to choose their medical needs between worse or less bad. S...

In the article "U.S.A. Land of Limitations" by Nicholas Kristof there are three quotes that I found in the text that explain the main idea best. The first quote that I found was at the beginning of the article explaining that this country is a great place to start a new life because it is, yet more than any other first world countries the chances of becoming successful if you were born poor are very slim. "A child born in the bottom quintile of incomes in the United States has only a 4 percent chance of rising to the top quintile." This means that if you were born poor that there is not a high probability statistically that you will make it to the top. That's what makes success stories in this country even more impressive because we know the freedom we have yet there are limitations instilled to knock people back down. For example, Rick, Kristof's friend was neglected as a child and raided himself and his three other siblings, he had a brilliant mind but ...

Yesterday I went to The Vagina Monologues at Rhode Island College, created by Eve Ensler. This performance was a staged reading of ensemble pieces from vagina interviews which became vagina monologues. It is performed every year around Valentine's day (or as they called it V Day). The focus of this I believe was to get people to not be so uncomfortable when discussing vaginas and women's pleasure. I definitely pushed myself to go, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word vagina in my life more than I had last night in the eighty minutes I was there. Basically, a variety of women in different shapes, ages, races, and identities came on stage and read a series of one women or several women's stories that were shared with the author. The interviews read ranged from a 72-year-old woman who shared her personal experience entitled “The Flood” (which was funny) to a 16-year-old girl who was always told her vagina couldn’t be touched but was raped by her fathers best friend and h...