Nancy Avelar

February 28, 2016

SED: Annotations
Annotations, How Listening to Students Can Help Schools Improve

There is a now a broad consensus that our nations high schools are not adequately
serving the needs of students or society and that they are in need of substantial reform.

I feel as though the article initially does little to provide evidence that such trouble in schools
is occurring. I have read in the last week, an article mentioning how this is all a myth and that
ultimately schools are doing the same rather than worse, so it makes it difficult to believe the
article at first.

According to these critics, the modern high school was inspired by a factory model of
education, in which hierarchical management structures, a burdensome and inchoate
bureaucratic division of labor.

This is something that is known, that the school system started in order to help normalize
kids with a long working day. Today we still follow some of the bad habits that were formed
ages ago, and it seems as though politics is what drives a lot of the decision making in
schools.

With substantial commitments to this effort, the drive to create smaller high schools is
sweeping the country.

This article seems old, yet is not. I thought it was published in the late 1990s but found it was
more past 2005. The reason this shocked me was because I have not heard about this
sweeping effort that the article talks about, that is leading decisions to create smaller high
schools. In fact, this is the first that I hear about it. I do think smaller schools could be a
positive thing though. Currently I intern at Central which is about 3,000 students, and
sometimes I do feel as though I do not have enough time to focus and build a relationship
with all my students. So a smaller school would help.

Teachers should be firm and not allow students to get away with preventing other
students from learning.

I recently had taught a lesson when a substitute teacher was alongside me. There were four
students who would not be quiet and I was unable to remain firm. After the class was over, I
reflected on what occurred and the most upsetting part was that it was disrupting the learning
of other students. It affected me, and I would like to improve on this to prevent this from
occurring again.

When asked to describe one aspect of their school that they did not like, 36 percent of
the students cited the emphasis on test preparation

Test preparation sometimes looses focus from actual learning in the classroom. Students are
sometimes unable to show how much they know from a standardized test, so it is unfair to

Nancy Avelar
February 28, 2016
SED: Annotations
hold graduation over their heads. This issue is one that is not talked about enough, but should
be so that the education system could change for the better.