Week 2 Fried and Lindquist

As i continue to read Fried's Passionate Teacher Im coming across more ways to think about how my classroom will be shaped in the future and what aspects even at this point i feel to be essential to a sucessful classroom. Ths ideas however, that stuck out most from the chapters was the idea that we are there to prepare children for the future. "Education is, afterall, about enabling students to know and do important things and to act as decent, responsible, and thoughful people" (46). In order to complete such a task a teacher must go into the each school year with a mission and an established mindframe of how they want to portray themselves while maintaining an open mind to reform despite the potential for negative perceptions from others. I also enjoyed the "less is more" debate on content in chapter 3 because it brought up valid points from each view point that every teacher faces. With time constraints due to testing and the importance on areas like math and ELA teachers have to decide what the most important information is to teach while also restricting the amount of information to avoid overwhelming students. The answer that Fried provides, " For the passioante teacher, its got to be both-students will experience a rich, content filled curriculum; students will discover for themselves the excitement of in-depth study" (55). I also found the chapter on designing a unit as a good place for reference to help organize thoughts and ideas for curriculum development. My experieces in a school provided a real life reflection upon Friend's theory about "the game" The general workings and expectations within a school keeps this game alive and unfortunaty i have seen that teachers have so much respoonsibility and even though they may know that students take the easy way out, they are too worried about what will be covered next or what test the children need to be ready for and not about the quality of the immediate results.
The Lindguist book i feel has provided me with a lot of information and though a little overwheming i can see how it can be integrated in a very useful way. The chaper on student teacher interactions was very informative in terms of providing me with many ideas of how to create sucessful classroom management. The importance of allowing students to partake in creating the classroom rules and feeling that they have some control over their classroom experience i feel to be an essential part in a sucessful classroom. If the students respect follow their rules while knowing that the teacher respects their ideas i feel creates a peaceful classroom. The other chapters continued to expand my knowledge and idea base of how to constantly expose my students to fun, content filled, and engaging activities by working crosscurricularly or introducing activites that extend beyong simple art projects or worksheets that will be more memorable for the students.