Module 2

           This week's chapters really put things into perspective on how I would want to set up my classroom and brought a lot of issues that teachers face to light.

             In chapter 4, what stood out to me was the different disabilities that were discussed. When I was in college I got to observe a gym class that was both students with disabilities and those without. It was great to see the interaction between all students and I think in the gym setting it is a great time for those students with disabilities to be able to express themselves and for all students to come together through physical activity. I really liked and thought it was important how Woolfolk discussed that we must not label people by their disabilities because this implies that the condition labeled is the most important aspect of that person. People with disabilities are first and foremost people! That being said their disabilities don't define them and that shouldn't be how we label them. The text does a great job addressing the right and wrong ways to label. As future educators, we have to be aware that from one year to the next our students will all be very different, and some students may have intellectual or physical disabilities. We have to continue to treat all students fairly and for the individual that they are.

            Chapters 5 and 6 really dove into what most American classrooms are today which is very diverse and many teachers face students who are bilingual. Just like chapter 4 how with students with disabilities we never know from one year to the next what kind of students we will have in our classroom the same applies in terms of different cultures, race, socio-economic status, and religion. Referring back to "the salad bowl" reference a classroom is made up of an assortment of ingredients (students) that make up one great salad! In chapter 6, it is addressed the fact that children with low SES tend to see a relationship with low achievement in school. Unfortunately, those students who live in poverty often struggle for a meal from one day to the next. Imagine expecting your brain to work at 100% when all you think about is how hungry you are, and for many students who are living in poverty that is their unfortunate reality. There is also the idea that because these students come from a low SES often times they develop low self-esteem and it is not helped when teachers tend to place lower expectations on them because of their situation. This is of course not fair to the student and does not help them advance in any way, instead, it hinders them from ever reaching their full potential. As future educators, we have to take into account that every student deserves all that this life has to offer, and we should be paying attention and allowing all our students to be successful and not be the reason that they are held back from overcoming their current situation that as young students thus far have had no control over. That is why I really enjoyed reading about multicultural education because this specifically is designed to increase educational equality and where there is a value on diversity, which I believe is exactly how it should be!

          In Chapter 8, the brain is the main focus. This chapter talked a lot about memory. There is something called working memory which Woolfolk describes as the workbench of conscious thought. In order to keep memory working for longer than 20 seconds maintenance rehearsal is used along with elaborative rehearsal. Maintenance rehearsal is mentally repeating something, while elaborative rehearsal would be making connections with knowledge from long-term memory, it also aids in helping new information make its way to someone's long-term memory bank. Working memory is limited and that is why our machine of a brain tends to chunk information in order to better process and store everything. This week for one of our discussion questions we had to take an IQ test for something like this it requires working memory span and is directly related to performance because it requires a higher-level of thinking. It was under a fixed time and required controlled attention. It is interesting to think about how our brain works and processes information in various ways.