Hw- 41 Initial Internet Research on Schooling

Lawson, Candy, "Social Skills and School", http://www.cdl.org/resource-library/articles/social_skills.php Center for Development and Learning. 25 February 2010

Exploring the social scenes and its affect on children at school, this article provided reasons why social interaction is key in a child's movement towards adulthood. The author, Candy Lawson, Ph.D. begins with "While school can be a positive social experience for many children, for others it can be a nightmare." A basic insight but why?

Lawson throughout the article guides her insights through the different area's of social interaction such as Social status and communication skills. The one that caught my eye while reading, was her piece on Social skills. "Social inability can be a lifelong problem...social incompetence can be more debilitating and detrimental to success in life than learning problems." Lawson is right, because a child's inability to solve an issue, initiate, maintain and end conversations would end the child's future in a very social interactive world.

http://www.familyresource.com/parenting/character-development/social-skills-and-school-age-children

This brief article also spoke about how social interaction can affect a child's comfortably within school explaining again that in the future, the child may enter the workforce more prepared and the ability to socialize.

According to this article, a child's inability to appropriately react and socialize in school has a negative affect on their learning ability and therefore struggle with the ability to feel positive about school. That's interesting, but like most teens, even for those who are very social, still seem to find school as a positive stepping stone?

http://www.nasponline.org/resources/factsheets/socialskills_fs.aspx

This article which also talked about social skills in school gave more of a brief summary about why it is good and the consequences of when there are poor social skills. Also provided in the article were helpful tips to encourage those of not so high social interaction to find social skill programs.

After numerous of sites I read, and articles that explained socialization in schools, it became all to repetitive. Each new website I clicked, all said the same thing above but differently, all referring to a child's inability to socialize at an early age. By reading these repeating articles, I started to wonder, what happens when you become to good at socializing? Can being good at socializing affect the way you act in school? Yes, it does. For myself, I find that I can socialize well, and because of that I find myself in school having a lot friends, but the addiction to socialize with everyone gets me in trouble with teachers who have the power to fail or pass me in school. In school, our goals are to pass/succeed. So should being good a socializing be an advantage when most of the teachers are always telling us to "shut up, sit down, leave the classroom?" I couldn't find any articles on things like that though.

Hw- 40 School Interviews & Synthesis

1. Myself.

Q:What life skill should be taught in school?

A: I think learning how to interact with people on a more formal level because we need to know how to talk to people during job interviews.

2. Friend

Q: What life skill should be taught in School?

A: "umm...I think social skills should be taught in school, for example having a proper conversation or like at a interview."

3: Teacher/Counselor

Q: What life skill should be taught in School?

A: Networking, definitely networking, because I see kids everyday using a certain slang and not properly transitioning from hanging with their friends to talking to adults/teachers. Which I think should be a very important life skill that should be taught.

4: Friend

Q: What life skill should be taught in School?

A: How to interact with people. I think majority of people don't know how too.

5: Teacher

Q: What life skill should be taught in school?

A: It is really important to know how to collaborate with other people because when you get out into the workforce, you must know how to interact with people at work, even if you don't like them.

After these interesting and insightful interviews about what life skill should be taught in school, everyone said basically the same thing. Knowing how to interact with people should be the #1 life skill taught as opposed to other life skills. Majority of the people interviewed said that people lack in making the transition from talking to your friends and then talking to an adult/teacher. It was interesting to find one of my friends to say that most people just do not know how too and that he is confident in himself that he knows how too. I believe everyone lacks in some sort of way in interacting with people, especially with those who are adults because we are not use to talking that certain way.

Hw- 39 First School Assignment

Questions:
1. When/Who started School in America?
2. What's the difference in curriculum between Private Schools and Public Schools?
3.Why is a 65 a passing grade?

Ideas:
1. School is structured to build and prepare us for the workforce.
2. Like the Cool unit, we use school as a tool to build ourselves into something except it is more directional depending on the time and effort we put into it.
3. School alters our social life.

Experiences:
1. Being in a public school has more of a diversity where I feel my comfortable then compared to Private Schools where more of one race is found.
2. Going to school is a source of where I can find mixed emotions due to the pressure, friends, accomplishment, etc school has to offer.
3. Being graded and tested is a great way to build and brake a person.

School. An institution for the youth. Before, education was a privilege only given to people that came from the wealthy side of life. Now, it is available to anyone; School builds and creates futures for those who take advantage of it. A system that is teaching us how to think and make, but are we really thinking and being guided to think in a specific way. Is school a brainwashing facility to control society easily targeted towards children? Hitler, a once powerful and sadistic man controlled his entire country by manipulating the youths by guiding them in a specific path in school. He easily controlled the minds of the youths learning capabilities and structured it in a way he wanted it to be. In America, we learn a lot about the positive and right-wing history instead of the negative aspects of American history only to be brainwashed and manipulated into believing that our country is valiant and heroic. Occasionally we spend some significant time on learning it of course, but not enough to actually see that we are not so good after all. Weird.

It is great that school is a given opportunity to all to teach us how to think, but also made to teach us in one directional path? What other contradictions can we find in School?

Hw-38 Art Project

The Coolest Video from Jin Omae on Vimeo.

For my Art project for the Cool unit, I worked in a group acting out the very possible and a bit humorous situations that happen in a school environment. Our video we put together was made to show the many "cool" poses in the school "cool" environment such as the specific "cool" handshake and teasing another to build a stronger social status. I hope people realize from watching our mini-movie that school seen through a social lens, is about building and following a specific and ever changing scene, and if one does not follow correctly, they fade back in the high social status of "cool."

The process of the project was fairly easy to make because most of what we do in this video is actually what we do even OFF camera. Acting it out was not a problem, because we perform these scenes 5 days a week. Coming up with a certain insight made by possible topics we're a bit confusing because we wanted to make sure it was funny, but also had a deeper meaning. In the group, I felt that I contributed to finding the funnier aspects of school "cool" poses and incorporating them into one scene.

Making an art project to display the "cool" poses made in our lives I feel is cool because of the many absurdities and "whys" we do perform these daily routines of building and getting to the top of this "cool" social status.