Freire, Rose, Gatto, Black

In Freires, Banking Concept of Education" Freire says "Narration(with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize the narrated content.  Worse yet, it turns them into "containers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teacher."  In the movie Chalk, Mr. Lowry is trying to teach his kids by having them memorize various history vocabulary terms.  I think at that point he was feeling that it was futile and just wanted to get the day over with.  Interestingly Mr. Lowry was the one teacher that kept trying to reach his students and ended up engaging more fully with his students later in the school year and being more successful in gaining his students respect.  He maybe recognized that he needed to learn how to talk to the kids on their own level.  He went so far as to learn their slang and won a slang spelling contest.

Mike Rose speaks of engaging students in his article from the Washington Times, “The Answer Sheet: ‘Mike Rose’s Resolutions on Education’” when he states “To have more young people get an engaging and challenging education.” In the movie “Chalk” there are several examples of how to not achieve this result. Mr. Stroope actually pulls aside his top two students and says to one of them “Stop using big words in class, I’m not even sure if you understand the meaning of some of the words that you use.” This is his attempt to cover his own understanding of the words that he is using which leads to what he told the other student. To a girl who is obviously bored and possibly insulted by the ignorance of her teacher Mr. Stroope said, “Don’t giggle in class when I am talking, it makes me look stupid in front of the rest of the class.” He makes these statements in order to possibly get the rest of the class to like him more and therefore help him accumulate more votes for the teacher of the year award. 

In Gattos writing, he says "Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high school that warehouse 2000 to 4000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado".  We see this in the movie  Chalk, there is a scene where the assistant principal is running thru the maze of hallways trying to find a wayward student.  She has to communicate with someone on a radio to get directions to where the student is and probably where she was.  All the hallways are named in order to make negotiating them easier for the students and staff but that does not seem to be very effective as the assistant principal was lost in her own school.

In Lewis Black’s sketch “On Education in America”, he mentions teachers that are “totally unqualified” who show up at a school and say “I want to help”. It is not even difficult to compare this statement to real life which in itself is difficult to understand why when you realize it means that our children are being taught by people who have not met the minimum standards of being an educator. In the film “Chalk”, Mr. Stroope was exactly this type of teacher. He was visited by a faculty evaluator where they reviewed his shortcomings from their last meeting, which he had still not even attempted to work on. These shortcomings included having an education plan and being disorganized. What is a teacher if not an organized person with a structured plan to impart their own knowledge on the children they have been entrusted to educate? Why do we have people like this in our education system? The only answer I can see for both of these questions is that we as parents and as students do not push to make it different. Parents need to be engaged in the education of their children and students need to have enough stock in their own education to stand against such inadequacies.