Columbine and the Media Vlog

Above is one last video discussing the Columbine research I did. It's a bit long and feels ranty at the end, but that was bound to happen with the subject matter.

Psychology of a Villain

Okay, so the above video is not exactly relevant to the title, seeing how Batman is more of a hero than a villain. Then again, he does have issues of his own…

That’s not important. What is important is that that video, in conjunction with my assignment on Columbine, provided the foundation for my first ever “Unit Plan!” Despite minimal training with curriculums, I ended up having to write one. It was a daunting task (like the majority of graduate school has been) but being the ambitious individual I am, I attacked it head-on. And honestly, I actually kind of like it.

The overarching goal was to understand who a villain is and what makes him/her the villain in the story. This came from the idea from the Columbine shootings. For the longest time, the media and really everyone involved thought they understood why they did it. Yet skip ahead about ten years and the reality was that we didn’t until relatively recently. So this unit plan poses those questions: Who is the villain? What makes him so? Why does he do the things he does? Is it because he is evil? Why he is evil? What is evil?

This unit plan tries to answer all that by allowing the students to explore these issues through readings and discussion. As an English teacher I had to sprinkle in a few writing assignments naturally, but most of them are personal exploratory pieces to simply get the students thinking deeply about these issues. The major piece of writing is a character study in which a student explores all the above questions focusing on a single character and tries to access whether or not a character is sympathetic in their brand of evil. I believe that is an interesting twist and truly challenges a student to think critically on the questions I pose.

My favorite part may be how a bookend the unit plan. I would ask a few questions at the beginning, record the answers and then ask the questions again and see if the answers change. That would judge whether or not my students understood the lesson and if their perspectives changed based on the experiences within the lesson. That is the most important of teaching after all: developing the minds of students and watching them grow within the classroom.

Columbine

It goes without saying that Columbine is not easy to talk about. It truly is a tragedy and is possibly one of the darkest times in the history of American education. Sadly, it is an event that in many cases has repeated itself time and time again with Sandy Hook being a reminder of that, having only happened a year ago. Even as I write this, I am having some difficulty trying to discuss it, failing to find anything worthy to say dare I simply go on saying what has already been said in the past 10+ years since Columbine. I also do not want to stir unnecessary controversy in my discussion of these “touchy” subjects (with full understanding of why many do not want to say anything that is out of place or can be taken in poor taste, though context does help).

However, nativity has been lost in the past few weeks. I decided, of my own volition, to research Columbine. In particular, I wanted to see what people have said about it. To see how people talked about. What people knew, or at least what they thought they knew. I wanted to see how people felt about it.

Given the fact that Columbine had happened more than ten years ago, there was a lot out there. I presumed I knew a fair amount about the shooting. Sure, I was exceptionally young when it occurred and was probably too busy watching cartoons to bother listening to the coverage. Even then, I probably would not have the knowledge or insight to comprehend what happened on the day. Yet, the story has almost become common knowledge since then. Little did I realize that the “knowledge” I once had was nothing more than myths fed to the people by the media. These myths were built on speculation and bold conclusions. Yet, we chose to believe it at least for a time.

Fast-forward to the present, and Columbine becomes that much more complicated. For better or worse, the truth has been uncovered. Columbine had become a terrorist attack, orchestrated by disturbed students. It is hard to tell if Columbine was meant to be a largely political event, and what Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had intended, if nothing else to stir the people and make history, but the media had made it political. Columbine became a vehicle of political agendas, powered by fear and anxiety engineered by a media. Few stories ever discussed drove the students other than a disturbed mental state or a small case of bullying. Instead, Columbine became an issue about security and gun control. No source ever talked about the source of problem. We became obsessed with the symptoms.

And that’s the real issue here. The media hardly prescribed solutions that mattered, such as counseling programs that actually help students or education that prevents bullying through more proactive programs. There is so much that society can do to prevent tragedies like Columbine, yet instead we become obsessed with the means of how it happened instead of the “why?” We ask “how did they get the guns” instead of “why did they want them.” We are asking the wrong questions and therefore coming up with the wrong answers. It’s so easy to pass uniformed blame and hope that somehow a good solution will sprout out of nowhere and fix everything. But as long as the powerful force that is the media keeps asking the wrong questions, society will come up with the wrong answers.

Self-Efficacy and Writing

I have recently taken up researching the effects of feedback on student’s writing and the best practices that have emerged in recent studies for as an English teacher, I feel it is my responsibility to understand how feedback affects my students and how to best give feedback to give my students the best education possible. Feedback is one the many, and perhaps most common, ways in which English teachers and instructors communicate with students. Most often feedback is directly at the students’ writing, commenting on what they did well and what they could improve on. However, making it as broad as that does not do justice to how complex feedback truly is. To be completely honest for a moment, I did not expect to see feedback being broken down in the manner in which it is based on the research I completed. I understood the basic fundamentals of what it was, what it entailed and how to put it into practice, but never would I expect a deeper science base and an expansive number of professionals conducting studies on feedback implementation in the classroom.

With this all in mind, what was most interesting is how feedback is so connected to the concept of self-efficacy. I knew such a connection existed, as previous studies on this subject matter proved as much, however the professor whom is guiding my research more or so implied, that one can be studied without the other (thereby allowing me to focus more on practical forms of feedback and ignore most of the theory behind). My research proved otherwise.

Self-efficacy can be defined as one’s own belief in their abilities to complete tasks and accomplish goals. Feedback is proven to be so intertwined with self-efficacy that separating the two became very difficult, nigh impossible, while I conducted my research. This is because a teacher can inspire or cripple a student’s self confidence with the feedback provided. This is because of the theory of mediators, which is essentially, is how we communicate. Questions posed that confuse rather than clarify can be wound our self-esteem and we lose hope. Yet, praise and commendations can stimulate it, as we know we accomplished something.

Feedback becomes so much more than what we say; it also becomes how we say it. Feedback serves as the connecting device between writing and self-efficacy as well. Writing is practically dependent on self-efficacy. Can you recall the last time you felt as though a major writing assignment felt like a burden? That is because of a relative lack of self-efficacy. It drives the writing process, and subsequently, when teachers give feedback, there are studies that prove teachers can improve that. If teachers can tap into that well of potential, writing will no longer feel like a chore or some arduous task. It will become more natural, easier to teach and more fun to engage in. Students can better develop their abilities and become better learners. Isn’t that what teaching is all about?  

Truly Injecting Democracy into the Classroom

Injecting democracy into a classroom is not an easy task. Despite the democratic society the United States of America prides itself on being, education is surprisingly much closer to being an autocracy due to its teacher centric classroom structure (never mind the large bureaucracy that looms over them). At the end of the day, the teacher is in control, dictating what the students do day in and day out with the hopes they will walk away more intelligent and wiser than they were when they first stepped into the room. From my experience, few teachers stray away from this structure following an old adage of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

That was until recently. In a course entitled “Teaching, Democracy and Schools,” my professor decided to turn the class on its head and give the students free reign on an assignment. The idea behind the assignment was for the students to design an ideal school, permitting it satisfies certain requirements. These requirements were far from crippling, truly allowing the students to design the school with few limitations. But the twist was not the assignment; it was the process in which the students could take to complete it. Options included: working alone, working in small groups, or (most radically) working as an entire class. Needless to say, it was not surprising (at least to me) what my class chose.

Now I get why these guys struggle to get things done.

Working as a class was clearly an exercise in democracy as now you have 24 voices that need to be heard and included into a single idea/project. Needless to say, things did not go very smoothly in the beginning. Organizing ideas, staying on task and overbearing desire to compromise slowed the process to a screeching halt. All too often people wanted to synthesize all the ideas and then attempt to mold them, however, it never went as planned. Additionally, splitting up work was nearly impossible because a lack of constant (or efficient) communication. When structure was finally installed, it was almost too late (praise the fates we had an extended deadline). Fortunate favored us as the concluding moments of the project went better than expected. Overall, if I have to say anything about how we did as a whole, I would say we were “impressive.” The process was unlike anything we ever did and we performed quite admirably all things considered, finding a means to complete the assignment while staying true to the vision we had…at least for the most part.

What is more interesting is how one considers the implications of implementing this class structure to an assignment in other classrooms. I say “other classrooms” merely because this was used in a classroom full of graduate students (many of which are like-minded) that seek to become teachers in some respect. What about a high school class of potentially diverse teenagers with a wide range of aspirations of lack thereof? Or a middle school classroom of volatile children with raging hormones? Or a bunch of overly energetic elementary students who may or may not love school at that point? This structure for an assignment would be very interesting to include in a curriculum because of the potential it has on the students. It could get the more apathetic ones involved. It could promote new ways to look at problems. Best of all, it gets democracy into the classroom, making all the students understand how our government and by extension society truly operates. The hidden curriculum here cannot be understated. It’s that important. It is just of matter of doing it and making it work. There’s the tricky part that I have to figure out.

Inequality in Schools and How We Could Fix It

Linda Darling-Hammond wrote a piece called “The Flat Earth and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future” which focused a great deal on the startling amount of inequity and discrimination in schools today. I use the word “startling” for few words are apt as that to describe my feelings on how prevalent this problem is. Let’s not confuse my reaction with nativity, for I am not as ignorant to pretend there is not some degree of discrimination in schools. I was just surprised on how widespread it is and how damaging it can be.

Hammond pounds the reader with a number of statistics, including this not too shocking but above all, disappointing one: “Only about 17% of African American young people between the ages of 25 and 29—and only 11% of Hispanic youth—had earned a college degree in 2005, as compared with 34% of White youth in the same age bracket” (318). She drew this statistic for the U.S. Census Bureau from the year 2005 and it is very likely that the statistics have not changed significantly for better or for worse in the past eight years. Because of these limited graduation rates, many end up turning to crime for one reason or another and according to Hammond “nearly 40% of adjudicated juvenile delinquents have treatable learning disabilities that were undiagnosed and unaddressed in schools” (Hammond 318).

Hammond speaks about the classical fix for this problem: funding. However, unlike others, Hammond gives a solid reasoning beyond this: certain schools, particularly urban schools that have higher minority student populations, do not have the resources needed to tend to all students and their respective needs. As she writes, “Educational outcomes for students of color are much more a function of their unequal access to key educational resources, including skilled teachers and quality curriculum, than they are a function of race” (Hammond 320). This may seem a bit redundant, considering, this is what everyone who advocates for more school funding says. However, Hammond does speak the truth as she enters more detail, leading to the fundamental problem with educational reform: a lack of resources for the lower level students in less well funded schools. Tracking only serves to greater expand the achievement gap. In fact, Hammond is quite critical of tracking claiming that is not significantly benefit the higher tier students and only further does a disservice to the lower level students (Hammond 324).

With this all being said, Hammond does propose a few solutions. A new plan, really, and one can truly provide at least a foundation to better remedy this problem and take full advantage of increased funding, should schools ever receive such a thing. It begins with hiring more skilled, more knowledgeable teachers especially in subjects of high need, such as math and sciences. This is already happening in some districts, as math and science teachers are in higher demand as it is. The second aspect is improved teacher preparation, with better trains teachers with the skills needed to be a skilled teacher. This is a given, truly, and should already be included in teacher prep programs and teacher education. This comes more down to college reform, from my perspective, and is out of the hand of elementary and secondary schooling. The last aspect is something I am particularly fond of: support mentoring for new teachers. Veteran teachers can mentor younger teachers and provide them with much needed advice and knowledge they will not get in a classroom. This allows them to acquire much needed skills or ideas that can place in their own classrooms to improve the education for students. Taken as a whole, Hammond’s ideas would much better improve the condition of schools and take full advantage of any increased funding or reforms that may and hopefully will take place in the upcoming years.