This week we got to take a roller coaster of emotions through the journey of one young students best and worst year possible. First off ill say again we have been very lucky that our profs have put together a well rounded set of readings they keep you off balanced and you never really know what to expect next but they all touch you in a different way. This story is a semi autobiography about a Spokane Indian named Arthur “Junior” Spirit who decides that if he doesn’t change schools to get of the reservation that he will die either physically or spiritually. This decision is met with a lot of pain and anger from the people on the reservation especially from his best friend Rowdy. During his transition at his new school he begins to learn different lessons about life on and off the reservation and starts to appreciate what he has in this opportunity away but also what he has left behind at home. The story takes has some incredible highs and the lowest of the lows and anyone that I am able to recommend this to I will.
Personally I only wish one day to be able to display the amount of strength that Junior was able too. Leaving the reservation knowing that it was going to make him and his family so hated was huge but none of that is possible without the support that he felt from his family to go out there and achieve to his full capacity. When I was in high school I also changed school because I believed that the environment I was in was holding me back, there was a lot of drug use and violence at my school and a lot of teachers that were me worried about their safety. The problem for me was the high school that I wanted to go too was 30 minutes away from where we lived and would only accepted me if I lived in the area and I remember sitting down with my mom to tell her what I wanted and even though we would have to pick up and move and displace my brothers and sisters she moved us into the area so I could switch schools. I felt very selfish My 3 youngest siblings also had to change schools and leave their friends behind that they had grown up with but everyone was supportive of me because no matter the cost she was going to put us in the best situation succeed and we understood as a unit that we all have to sacrifice for us to all be successful. There is a main message I took from this story that I hope that I can pass on to anyone I come across whether it be classmate, students, or any random person on the street. That message is that we do not have to be a victim of our situation we can always do better if we aspire to. We are capable of overcoming any situation if we learn the lesson that is being taught at that moment. Early on in the book Arthur says, “Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No poverty only teaches you how to be poor.” And for the longest time I believed that I believed that I was never destined to be anything I believed that I would never attend University or find a career that wasn’t sports related. I believed that because we had nothing that in turn I would have nothing and no matter how much my mom tried to stay positive her struggle was real trying to support all of us and I just saw it as a cycle. I learned from watching my mom bust her butt everyday that no matter how many jobs she had to work she wasn’t giving up till all 5 of us were successfully away at school and she never became a victim of her situation. Once I learned this the sky became the limit there was nothing or no one that was going to stop me and that has lead me here today. Once you let go of the feeling of helplessness you will able to achieve so much more that you ever thought you could. The struggle is real for everybody and for some people like Arthur the struggle is more real than most of us will ever experience but with the right support and the right mindset we are all powerful beyond measure.
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What a depressing week! This was my first real introduction to residential school and it left me feeling awful. For those that are not aware, in the 19th century, the Canadian government believed it was responsible for educating and caring for aboriginal people in Canada. It thought their best chance for success was to learn English and adopt Christianity and Canadian customs. Ideally, they would pass their adopted lifestyle on to their children, and native traditions would diminish, or be completely abolished in a few generations. The Canadian government developed a policy called "aggressive assimilation" to be taught at church-run, government-funded industrial schools, later called residential schools. The government felt children were easier to mold than adults, and the concept of a boarding school was the best way to prepare them for life in mainstream society. This went horribly wrong with the students suffering from emotional physical and sexual abuse at the hands of the church. Students were punished for speaking their own language and were kept from their families for the majority of the year. Even siblings attending the same schools were segregated based on gender. The readings and film this week exposed me to all of this for the very first time and it led me to few of questions. The first question I have is how is this much different than the Holocaust? Now I understand the holocaust had a massive death toll compared to residential schools but the premise and background behind them are very similar. Both governments believed a certain group of people were inferior to theirs. Both governments set out to eliminate a certain culture because it was inferior and both governments decided that extreme techniques were needed to achieve these goals. Hitler and the Nazis were vilified for being the worst group of people to ever grace the earth and rightfully so but after watching what I watched and reading what I read the Canadian government and the Christian church don’t look very good in comparison. They took these innocent children from their homes destroyed their lives abused them locked them up whatever you can imagine was done to these poor kids and the worst part for me was that it was government sanctioned. They knew exactly what was going on in those schools and they took over 100 years to shut all of them down. In our schooling and society class we watched a video discussing whether what happened in residential schools should be considered cultural genocide and if it is than there should be very severe penalties including jail time for those involved. The second question I had was why has this been buried from some of us as students. For me personally we didn’t learn anything about residential schools growing up the topic was never brought up once. Instead we focused on other international crimes such as The World Wars, The Holocaust, and even the genocides that were happening in Africa while were still in school. All of these topics were taught to us and painted our government and us as Canadians in a very positive light rather than facing the truth that we too had a very ugly past. I feel cheated as a student that until this week a couple months after my 27th birthday, the same week my cousin who is the same age just had his first child, and the week our new Prime Minister is making headlines for having common sense is the first time I am learning about residential schools. We need to let the story out and allow all those that were hurt by this awful decision heal, and I believe the best way for this to happen is for all these stories to be told so that the children who are now adults can regain their voice by letting their story be told in their own words.
This film is a documentary of the lives of two refugee teenagers that sought and received asylum in Canada, and the struggle they go through during this whole process. Watching this movie invoked a lot of emotions for me and it starts with sympathy for Joyce and Sallieu. Sympathy based on the fact that I experienced a lot of the hardships they did growing up. For context I grew up in Toronto so all the images in the film I am familiar with from the opening scene in the airport to the highway and CN tower shot. I grew up with my Mom and 4 brothers and sisters in the north end of Toronto about 7 minutes from the airport and the neighborhood I grew up in had a lot of poverty. Growing up we very rarely went without necessities till my mom lost her job, she was laid of from the law firm she worked at for as long as I could remember and that’s when I was introduced to our broken system. I was in gr 7 when things started to go south for us my mom tried her best to find other jobs that would allow her to support us but there was very little she could find. We had to cut back a lot even on the basic necessities our diet consisted of a cheese sandwich for breakfast a cheese sandwich for lunch and spaghetti for dinner and if you were still hungry you had to go to sleep because there was nothing else to eat. The worst year for us was when I was gr 9, that year we were still living in a house and my mom was out of a job and collecting welfare the problem was that she could not afford to pay for the heat in the house with the amount of money she was being given so she had to make a choice. We ended up having to all sleep in the same room that winter to stay warm with this little electric heater in the room. Every morning she would wake up put pots of water on the stove to boil so we could take warm baths and get ready for school we would eat our cheese sandwiches and I would very rarely see my mom eat anything because it was more important for her to make sure we were fed than that she was fed.
This story has a lot more to it that I wont get into right now but the point I am trying to make is this and I am sorry if this is selfish, how are we as a country supposed to help refugees if we can not even take care of our own citizens. My mom has lived in Canada since she was 7 has full citizenship went to York University, repaid her student loans, pays her taxes worked in a hospital for over 10 years than worked in a law firm for another 7, and when it cam time for the government services that she had been paying into to help her support her and her family we ended up sleeping in the same room and she ended up hungry. There are countless other Canadians who are suffering the same thing and much worse. The homelessness in our province is growing as well as the unemployment rate. I don’t believe it is possible for us to help refugees the way we want to because we have failed so miserably and helping our own citizens. The main problem I have about speaking about this subject is that I have no solution. I am a very solution oriented person and I hate to be negative but watching this film and watching the news and reading about the public outcry about donating to help refugees from this place and the next when those refugees that we are all worried about granting asylum we forget about when they are here and end up falling victim to the system. We as Canadians need to do a better job of fixing our country before we try to fix the world and that is the only way real change can happen, yes there will never be zero homeless people but that’s what we should strive for. We should put more time and effort into taking care of government housing and making entry-level jobs more accessible. Changing laws about making food available for people that need it and making those centers priorities with not just food from donations but the amount of restaurants that have food near expiration or that they cant re serve the next day can be donated for hungry people to eat but I am pretty sure there are laws against that. The bottom line is that to often as a society we are worried about what is happening in other places of the world and how we can help someone else when we have so many people that we see on a daily basis that we just walk by and don’t acknowledge that are just as much in need as the people we see on TV and read about online, they just are not getting the publicity they deserve. Creating an environment for learning We have spent a good amount of time thinking about what our ideal classroom would look like and surprisingly this is actually the first time I have thought about it. I have always planned on being a phys. ed. Teacher but never thought of the gym as my classroom. But I have definitely learned something’s that I feel are important to creating a successful learning environment. The first is that I would have the students moving around from the beginning of class different activities would be set up during the class for students to do while everyone is getting changed. Attendance is usually where the most time is wasted sitting around and at Henry Munro they have the dot system that help prevent that. All the students are assigned a dot on the gym floor numbered 1-90 and when the whistle is blown everyone needs to go to their dot for attendance. This saves the teacher a ton of time when you only have to check the dots that are not rather than all the dots that are. If I were in a traditional classroom I would like my class to be as active as possible with minimal sitting. I recently learned of a company that manufactures standing desks for students (see video). This will keep students active and moving while working and will keep a greater number of students engaged. Another thing that I would want in my classroom are walls that were completely covered by whiteboards or painted with chalkboard paint so that my students would be able to write a map out all their ideas no matter how big or small. This will allow for great collaboration between students and for them to be able to get as creative as they want to be rather than just sitting at their desks working individually. The problem we as educators will know doubt run into is cost, all these ideas that we will come up with will cost money and if they are not within the mold of the board then a lot of our innovative dreams will be crushed. We will need to make sure our classrooms are conducive to optimal learning for students and as we have all learned that means no rows for our students. If possible circular desks would be ideal, we could also set up single desk is groups of 4 in squares or an L shape allowing for collaborative work to be done. Entre Les Murs was a very powerful movie and brought up some conflicting feelings for me and I am very happy we were assigned this film to watch. During my school life I have had two situations that remind me of situations that this movie brought to the forefront. Entre Les Murs is a story of a teacher in Paris, France that deals with a very difficult class in a difficult school. The teachers are constantly stressed by students that seem to care more about disturbing and insulting each other rather than being at school to learn. The main teacher in the film Francois struggles throughout the film trying to balance when to discipline his students and when to use it as a teachable moment, he tries his best to keep everyone engaged in creative ways but more often than not the class gets out of control and Francois loses his cool on a few occasions because of this.
When I was in Gr 7 there was a new homeroom teacher at our school named Mme Zurwinski and she was tasked with dealing with a large number of high-energy students that none of the other homeroom teachers seemed to want. Unfortunately all these high-energy students in one environment created a no win situation for our first time teacher. We overmatched her as a class especially since her way of disciplining us, as a class was quiet time so she didn’t send anyone to the office to start the year hoping that this strategy would calm us down. She became more and more stressed and more and more lost as the year went on their were constant arguments in class because there was very little structure and there were also parent complaints because the students that were actually trying weren’t learning as much the should be since we very rarely got through the lessons that were set out for us. Unfortunately as a class we broke her and after Christmas break she didn’t come back to our class we had a number of supplies for the rest of the school year including our vice principal for the last month and a half since they struggled to fill the vacancy. For the rest of the year I felt very bad for Mme Zurwinski and felt bad for the situation that I was a big part in creating. She was a very good teacher and we didn’t give her a chance, when we were sitting in the gym and everyone’s names were being called we were looking at each other knowing that the year before a lot of the students left sitting in the gym had trouble in the school with specific teachers and we felt as if we were unwanted and left to be with the new teacher and non verbally had decided that no matter what we were going to give whoever we were stuck with a hard time. The struggle for teachers in that situation is to get through to students without losing your cool and it is sometimes an impossible situation. The year after she left I was playing in a basketball tournament at Smithfield elementary school and in between games someone on the staff called out to me and it was Mme Zurwinski she had a new job at this school and she was very happy which was great to see and we talked a little bit and I wanted to apologize but could not muster up the courage and this situation definitely shaped my wanting to become a teacher. The other person who was greatly influential in me being where I am today is Mr. Paul Dias. Now Mr. Dias was my basketball coach for my last 3 years of high school but he turned out to be a lot more influential in my life than just a coach. I am not sure who my godfather is and growing up I was not sure what the whole point of being a godfather was but right now Mr. Dias is who I would consider to be the closest thing to being my godfather. He has talked me through so many situations that without him I know for sure I would not be in this situation today. Much like Soulymane in the film in my 5th year in high school I was under a lot of stress and pressure to get into university to set an example for the rest of my siblings. This stress made me have fits of anger if things didn’t go my way and thankfully teachers would send me to see Mr. Dias to talk me through what was going with me in my life. They kept going with me even when my anger got the best of me. When university applications were due I could not afford the fees associated with the applications and the money I made during the summer to pay for them I had to spend to get my car fixed so I was afraid to ask my mom for the money and the deadline was coming up. We were playing baseball in gym class and I struck out and some of the guys were messing with me but I wasn’t in the mood to joke around and I threw the bat luckily it didn’t hit anyone but this was my third or fourth incident that week. When I was talking to Mr. Dias he wouldn’t let me leave till explained to him what was going on because I was on my way to suspension which no one wanted. I explained to him my financial situation and he made me a deal that he had made to other students before me, the deal was that he would pay for my university application under the condition that if I don’t complete my degree I would have to pay him back and if I did graduate all he wanted in return was a copy of my diploma. To this day Mr. Dias and I are still friends and I can talk to him about anything that is happening in either of his lives he even sent me pictures of his last two children when they were born. The difference between the teachers at my high school and the ones in the movies is that they were actively looking for ways to keep from suspending students depending on the severity of the situation. This allowed students to work through problems we were having and we understood that were a lot of people looking to help. This is obviously not possible in every situation but it is something I hope we all strive for as educators. Francois saw potential in Soulymane especially when they did the self portraits and you can see that he wanted to help him but was unable to figure out a way to get through to him or to get the other teachers to see the glimpses that he did. It was also pretty cool to see the students doing their self portraits and them talking about the feelings they had while doing them which resembled what we discussed in class about the way some of us were feeling about the process. In these uncomfortable situations some of the most creative and inspired work is made and being out of your comfort zone helps us get connected with each other and others that have the pleasure to read our work. I was very happy to be able to start off my teacher eduction with this article by Daniels because so many of the points talked about in this article were factors in my education growing up. I grew up in the Northwest end of Etobicoke better known as Rexdale, some people may have heard of Rexdale on the news we are the home of the infamous Rob Ford. Growing up there was a lot of violence in the community it has died down some but there are still incidents. In the last 2 years One student was stabbed to death in school and two students were shot to death outside of their schools. While I agree with Daniels that the violence people think about is primarily fiction created by consuming too much american media there is also still a very real problem. Daniels writes, “The predominant strategies for working in such school districts seldom emerge from the perspective of possibility where future orientations and cultures that are transformational in nature are viewed as sites of strength. Rather, the texts that are purportedly written to enhance educational opportunities remain embedded in the idea of “fixing” the students and the overall communities that are bounded within the geographical and ideological space labelled urban." I agree that these students don't need to be fixed and neither do the communities but the overall perception of the schools in the communities and whether students can safely enjoy their education is the bigger issue the schools are facing. My highschool experience was somewhat the norm in my community where I completed grade 9 and 10 in an urban school and transferred to a suburban school to complete gr 11 and 12. The reason so many students from urban neighbourhoods transfer or begin school in the suburban areas is the reputations that the schools have developed over the years that are not accurate for the most part. Parents and students wanted to have a “better” and “safer” education which the did not believe they could receive in the urban schools even if it meant travelling nearly an hour on the bus to get to school when there are 5 urban high schools in the community with 2 of them being at risk of being shut down. The preconceived notions that Daniels spoke didn't only affect the teachers and teacher candidates they also trickled down to the community where they believed the best educations could only be obtained in the suburbs. The question I have is what can be done to help change this perception of urban schools, and how high up do those changes need to go? The article by Chambers was more difficult for me to follow because the stories she was telling did not relate to any of my experiences growing up. When she got to the end of her article I started asking question. Such as why didn't I learn a lot of these things while I was in school? I knew that the vast majority of canadians were immigrants but didn't learn how we came into possession of this land until after I had graduated from high school. Then that sparked why didn't we learn as much about the aboriginal people who were here before we got here and why was there history deemed not as important as the history our ancestors brought with them? I remember learning about why Christopher Columbus accidentally discovered the new world and as students we were lead to believe this was start of Canadian history even though there are so many more layers we didn't get to learn that can be argued is as important as the European and African history that we are taught. It also makes me wonder why other countries history is more important than our own? I never learned why Nunavut was formed just that it was. There was never any talk of the problems the creation of a new province brought with it such as the people in Holman that had to decide what side of the border they wanted to belong to but we learned of the problem colonization had on Africa and the problems the borders caused. My hope is that we can continue to expand Native American studies in schools and not just in schools like Rideau but all across the country because I think is important to know the full history of our country for us to be the progressive inclusive nation we strive to be we can not have an important part of our nation under-represented in our education system.
The question I have is can there be student led learning? As educators I know we will have a limited amount of time to get through the content we want but is it possible for the students to directs us down different paths that they are interested in rather than following a script. I know growing up I would been more interested in learning the full history of Canada rather than focusing so much on Europe. |
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