For anyone who has not seen this documentary, you need to. And anyone who has seen it, knows what I am talking about. What a horrifying situation that is happening in Sudan and Uganda. Children are being abducted out of their homes while they are sleeping so they can be enlisted in a rebel army. Other children are shot and murdered in front of their faces so the children will be desensitized. These children never get a chance to go to school, and when they are asked to draw a picture of ANYTHING, they draw blood, guns and death. These are children! Anywhere from 5 years old to 14! As teachers, we are taught to be suspicious of any our student’s drawing that have to do with violence at all, and here, all this children can draw is violence! Don’t get me wrong, I am not undermining the importance of abuse in the home, or any type of violence our children come to school with, but it sure puts things into perspective. What is being done to protect these children in Africa from the reality they face everyday. Please go to www.invisiblechildren.com and donate, or buy a t-shirt or a bracelet. Every little bit helps. I don’t know what else TO do, but I do know that this makes me want to go to Africa even more now after I convocate. Watching this movie tonight has re-sparked my passion for children, and I want to do everything I can, all the while knowing that all I really can do is pray.
Is our world getting better or worse? November 5, 2008
This is an interesting question to think about. Here are some statistics and information to chew on for both sides.
1) Cancer has gone crazy. “Based on current incidence rates, 39% of Canadian women will develop cancer during their lifetimes. Among men, 45% will develop cancer during their lifetime.” -Canadian Cancer Society
2) For the first time the United States has a president that isn’t white!
3) According to World Health Organization, someone around the globe commits suicide every 40 seconds.
4) In Canada, people don’t need to pay for healthcare. They are taken care of for free.
5) WHO estimates that one third of the world is well fed, one third of the world is under fed, and one third of the world is starving.
6) Human rights are becoming a global issue and people who were once denied rights like voting, and education are now part of their democratic system.
7) A six year old was shot in school… by another six year old.
There’s many more… but these are just a few of the goods and bads of our world. So, are we progressing? Or are we regressing?
Interesting links about humanity regressing – rob bell the gods aren’t angry
Scientific Truth part 2 September 24, 2008
I have received several comments about my post called Scientific Truth. I really appreciate them actually, even though the writers don’t agree with what I am saying. I can understand why some people may be upset about what I have written. In this post I am going to try and explain a little more about where I am coming from on the topic of Scientific Truth.
First of all, I have chosen to be a believer in Jesus. I believe he came to earth, lived as a man, died on the cross and rose again, justifying us before God. I also believe that the Bible is complete truth and it points us to Jesus. Now with that understood you can clearly see where I stand spiritually and maybe listen to where I am coming from. When I previously mentioned that there is no standard to measure scientific truth with, I mean that there is no “absolutely correct textbook” that has all of the correct answers in it that you can compare experiments and evidence against. For example, scientists were sure the earth was flat, but it turned out to be round. People thought the earth was the centre of the universe, but the centre ended up being the sun, chemists thought they knew all the elements of the periodic table, but there were more. Scientific “truths” continue to change and our knowledge increases, but we can base our ideas only on other ideas, not some textbook of absolute scientific truth. I believe that the Bible is in fact God’s absolute truth and we can base our ideas of the world from that.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to argue creationism and evolution right now on the blog. I know where I stand, and I know where other people stand. Both Creationism and Evolution need faith to believe. Both are theories and I do believe that neither can be proved 100% true (hence they are theories). This is why I wanted to let people know that we need to question scientific truth.
Now as a response to the suggestions that I shouldn’t be teaching, I strongly disagree. I have a desire for my students to be life long learners, and I plan on teaching children so they can grow to become that. I want to teach my children both evolution and creation so that they can understand from early on that there are critical ways of looking at things, not just from the standard point of evolution is correct. I don’t want them to just listen to what I say and take it all, I want them to study themselves and seek out their own answers. Someone wrote a response to my “Kindergarten” post that said “Do you actually believe that Kindergarten to grade 3 students can make a reasonable distinction between actual science and creation ’science’?” and my answer to that is HECK YES! I think that children are some of the only people who can really be objective because they have not had their whole lives to develop their biases. I will never underestimate the students I work with, and I am excited to teach them all subjects, including science.
Some resources that might help you understand the point I am coming from are below. They do a much better job at explaining things than I do, and I encourage you to take a look at them. And again, feel free to comment… I really do appreciate them.
The book The Limitations of Scientific Truth
Magazine Answers in Genesis
The book Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
Kindergarten August 14, 2008
Who really remembers their Kindergarten teacher anyway? You are 4 or 5 years old and you come to school so you can play in the sandbox, and climb on the monkey bars. Can a Kindergarten teacher really have any effect on their students at that young of an age?
I have been thinking a lot lately about how lost our teenage world seems. When Jon and I were at my parents house last night, my mom came home at 11:00pm fuming. She had just driven by some kid getting the crap kicked out of him across from a local elementary school. When she stopped and backed up, everyone ran away… including the kid. The week I wrote my post about teen girls, was the same week I dealt with a lot of issues with a couple of the teen girls I know. What is happening to our teenagers? The reason I am connecting Kindergarten with teenagers is because I am questioning my choice of grade levels to teach. I am specializing in Pre-K to 3 but is that where I should be? My heart is definitely for young children. I love how they learn and how they begin to understand things, but I am beginning to think that if I really want to have an effect on students, I should teach high school, or a higher grade where they may need a little bit more guidance.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that my job as a teacher is not to “fix” students. I don’t have the power to make choices for them or deliberately pursuade them to act a certain way… but I CAN see with my own eyes that a lot of the teens I meet need help, support and love. I know young children also have issues that need help and support, but the teenagers of today were three years old once! Does a Kindergarten teacher really make a difference?
No matter what grade I teach, my job and passion is to educate. I want to educate my students about maths, sciences, language and grammar, but I also want to educate them about life, love, relationships and society. Right now I don’t plan on changing what I want to specialize in, and as of this September 08 I will be pre-interning in a Pre-K class, but these past couple weeks has sure opened to my eyes to see that there are some other options open for me if I want to take them.
Teen Girls August 8, 2008
Suicide, rape, drugs, alcohol, sex. These are normal words now a days. WHY?!? What kind of impact to we as teachers, youth leaders, parents and friends have on the teenagers we are in contact with? Sometimes I feel like no matter how much we care for them, or instruct them, or warn them, they still fall into trouble. When we send kids to high school, we are sometimes sending them into a waiting death trap. There is so much crap in high schools these days it makes me sick. It breaks my heart to know that beautiful young teenage girls can get walked all over by high school guys who think they have the right to do whatever they want. It makes me sick that rape is more common than we think. It makes me sick that drugs and alcohol are the NORM in high schools today. It makes me sick that majority of high schools kids can probably name one person they know who has been killed before the time they reach age 20.
Where have we gone so wrong? What can we do to fix any of this? The cheerleaders I coach, the youth group girls I work with all face the same issues… self confidence, pressures of sex, the pressure to drink. Don’t get me wrong, these were all issues I faced in high school as well, but why do they seem to be so much harder to overcome now then they were even 5 years ago?
I want teen girls to know that they are SO valuable. I want them to know that they are made in the image of God and that they are worth something! I want them to know that they don’t have to be physical with guys to be accepted. I want them to know that the way they live their life can make them unique… NOT the crazy shirt they wear to try and make a statement.
I am going to try and be an example to the teen girls I come in contact with and I pray that God will do a mighty work in high school girl’s lives.
White Privilege January 22, 2008
We discussed in my Educational Foundations class today what it means for us as white people to have privileges over other cultures. I was amazed at how much I was a fish in water and couldn’t see what was going on because I am the privileged group. I don’t know if I can come to any conclusions of what I think or how I can deal with this as a teacher in a classroom yet. But slowly I am being changed to see the real world and the racism that is still alive and prevalent today. This is a YouTube video I found that just begins to talk about what we discussed this evening.
K12 December 10, 2007
When I listened to one of the K12 conference speakers he spoke about computers in the school and how to implement them. One of the things he mentioned really interested me. He talked about how you shouldn’t give out the same “amount” of computers to each teacher and classroom. At first I thought this sounded unfair, but he explained it well. He said in the school district he works for, he needs a small written letter explaining what the teacher wants to use the technology for. If this teacher wants a new computer so he/she can check their email and put together a powerpoint for their class, it’s not being fair to the teachers who are going to use the technology for bigger and better things like blogging, “Google Reader,” online collaboration, video tools, voicethreads etc. Also, his job is to hold the teachers accountable. I think this is equally as important. A teacher might have good intentions to use those types of tools in the classroom, but never give it the time, and the technology could go to waste. This podcast just interested me because he was coming from the other side of the wall. He was the one that allocated where the computers go, who used them, and if they used them. I am on the other side. I am the ambitious teacher with dreams to use all sorts of technology in the classroom as long as I have the means to do so.
Mentorship December 7, 2007
I chose to mentor the younger students in Kathy Casiddy’s classroom. I am specializing in Pre-K to 3, and I felt that I would do a better job encouraging them to think then the grade 12’s. Kathy Cassidy posted a picture of two little boys. They looked like they could have been from South America. She got them to comment on the picture. Preston said this…
xbkdnfbhfnhjf. the hbvhncufj.mnngbilfkgh Editor: I think that the little boy is crying and the boy isn’t crying. It is green in the background.
I wanted Preston to reflect about why the boy was crying. I wanted him to put himself into the other child’s shoes so he could try and understand what was causing the conflict. (Centered on Piaget’s ideas of Pre-operational stage where a child can think symbolically and take another’s perspective.) This is what I commented…
Hey Preston
I agree with you. I think the younger boy is crying and the older boy isn’t. What would you do if you were holding a baby who was crying? Could you do anything to make them stop crying?
Comment Posted on November 26, 2007 at 10:51 AM by Danielle
SAVE ENERGY November 19, 2007
Here is our video about saving energy. We already have two honours from youtube. They are for non profits and activism.
