Writing Circles Blog 2

On Thursday I met with Lannie and Mike.  Lannie read my paper again, and liked the changes I made.  I moved around my introduction, and I feel that it makes a huge difference in my paper.  It sets up the whole discussion and point I want to make about the U.S. education system.  What I want to make a point of is that I believe our education system must change.  I am simply comparing our way to the way of the Japanese, and I am not saying their ways are the best.  Just like my every day lessons, I like to 'steal' ideas from others and slightly change them to work for me.  I see my research of the Japanese education to be the same.  I enjoy discovering what works for their culture, and thinking about how I can incorporate their ideas into my own classroom.

Mike read my paper for the first time this week since he was not here last week.  He enjoyed how I laid out the Japanese education culture so that he could relate back to it as my paper unfolded.  He also enjoyed how my personal experiences weaved throughout the middle of my paper.  Once I set up the Japanese culture, I was able to speak of my own experiences.

As I spoke with Lannie and Mike about my paper and how it excites me, I realized that the major difference between Japanese education and U.S. education is the sequence of the high school math.  I talked with them about how I believe our curriculum for math should be, especially Algebra I and Algebra II.  I began to think about how I would structure the curriculum to make it meaningful to the students.  I would never hear, "When are we ever going to use this?" again!  It made me excited to e-mail the professor at JCU about the sequence of curriculum for mathematics.  I really want to know how she feels about changing the sequence of Algebra I and Algebra II.  If we could make our content narrow and deep rather than shallow and wide, I believe our students would be leaps and bounds away from where we are today.

Talking with Lannie and Mike made me realize how invested I am with this topic.  It is not that I want to make our education system the same as the Japanese, but I want to use the best parts of their curricular content areas and make them our own.  I really look forward to discussing these topics with my colleagues to discover if they agree with my new ideas.