Class #3

                Today in class we talked about return on investment and taxes in the education system. This is something that interests me on multiple levels. I took two years of business at Edwards School of Business in Saskatoon, so I quite enjoy the business and money side of things. Also, the fact that I am in school to become a teacher and this will directly affect my ability to teach. Many people always complain about taxes and think that they should be lowered. Not knowing the repercussions of it. If that were to happen there would likely be big budget cuts in either healthcare or education. Personally, I don’t think either of those sounds like a good idea to me. I like the safety net of having healthcare even if I don’t need it. Also, if they cut teaching budgets, even more, it will add a lot more stress to teachers. Dr. Gabor Mate talked about childhood trauma being a major cause of addiction later in life. He said that addiction is not a choice or genetic but stems from childhood trauma. The key to healing is to unpack the trauma and come to terms with it. He didn’t mention how those healing stages happen but they do need to happen. In order to help the children but to also make a stronger society. We also discussed teachers abilities to predict their own students’ marks within 5%. I think that for the most part teachers should be able to do this quite regularly. I volunteered about 100 hours in a grade 7 math classroom last year and it did not take very long for me to figure out where their marks would fall. However, this could be a potentially harmful thing for the students. There was a case study that showed that teachers favoured the ‘smart’ students and therefore they excelled and developed much quicker. Whereas, the ‘not smart’ students were not helped nearly as much and they ended up with the lower marks. Despite the labels of smart and not smart being assigned at random. How well will I be able to avoid my own opinions on the students to try and help all students develop at similar paces?