Dau's visit

Dau a teacher at a college in Vietnam came and spoke to us on a nice Monday night. I had the privilege of hearing him speak twice, once in ed psych and once in growth and motor development. Each time he spoke I learned something new and some differences between the United States and Vietnam. In Vietnam the family name is a persons first name and their own specific name is their last name. This is because people take pride in which family they come from. They are concerned with helping our their family before themselves. Sometimes here in the United States we are concerned with ourselves and sometimes forget were we come from. This is something that I found to be rather interesting in his presentations. However the thing that I found to be the most interesting was the fact that he started out being born to parents who worked in the rice fields in Vietnam, some of the lowest people in Vietnam. He went from that to working his way through secondary school and University to become a successful college profesor. This is interesting as we go out and become teachers we should do everything in our power to help students who come from families that have absolutely nothing and try to help them become something extraordinary. I'm not saying we should just help students who have nothing because we should help all students reach their full potential to become extraordinary people. Mrs. Gruwell did this when she taught at Wilson High School in the Los Angeles area. She took a group of the "drop outs" or "hopeless" kids and taught them how to love reading and reaching their dreams as students and as people. So it is my goal when I am a teacher to help every student try to find a way to reach their full potential and become extraordinary people.

Increasing Standards in Schools

How do we increase our nations intelligence in reading, math, and science to keep up with the rest of the world? What are the Finnish doing that we are not? These are questions that several educators are asking these days. We have fallen so far in math and reading. We now rank around 25th in math and 15th in reading. This is poor for the nation that we are. We are the land of hope, freedom, prosperity, and excellence. Or so we use to be. We have fallen from the top and allowed other countries to pass us on the academic world, business market, and so on. In business we have shipped many of our factories to over seas countries leaving many of our people jobless. On the education field we have allowed ourselves to stay on the same level and let the world pass us. We need to work to improve our schools. The teachers need to be able to prepare students for the 21st century world and not the 19th century world. We need to set standards higher at all levels from 1st grade through graduate students. Does this mean giving our hours and hours of homework? No I do not believe so. I believe homework should be short sweet and to the point. I think we need to find ways to make reading fun for kids to do so that way they will read instead of play video games for 8 hours a day. Video games are fine as long as they are kept in moderation. I believe if we make reading fun for kids and they start to do it more it will only help increase reading scores allowing them to have active full functioning brains. This will also help with the math scores due to the students having active brains that are ready to be filled with knowledge just like a car is ready to be filled with gas and a person is ready to be filled with food.