HW 50

For the Gatto article, "Six Lessons," I feel like he is the epitome of a bad teacher because it seems like he is in the job as a paycheck and last resort and he wants the students to be like robots. He wants to keep the classroom like a typical class where students sit in rows and read from textbooks. It is a very conservative place. He doesn't let students have even a little bit of say in what they learn. For example, the fourth lesson he teaches is that he has the only say in the curriculum and that he doesn't care about people being curious because all the students should know is what they are being taught. He goes on to say that "Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately there are procedures to break the will of those who resist." The last sentence shows how he wants the students to obey him fully. In class, we talked about school being an institution and I think that in this case, Gatto is taking that to the extreme. He rules the place similarly to a prison warden. SOF isn't really like an institution because people have some say in what we learn and we don't sit in rows and are rigid.

In my class, Copeland came in to talk about his idea of saving students and about how that sounds very pretencious and stupid. I somewhat agree with him that it is a very Hollywood storyline of the hero teacher saving kids but I would assume it feels good to help save young people before it gets to be too late. I also like how he said he appreciates it when students are able to grasp the lesson they are learning in class and that he also learns a lot from his students. That is something that Gatto would never dream of doing and that is bad. Students are obviously young but they aren't dumb and they pose good questions to the teacher. The students will learn more if they also think for themselves instead of being spoon-fed information.