Ed. Journal – Choose a topic in Hunger of Memory

Ed. Journal – Choose a topic didn’t included in the reflection and reaction paper about “Hunger of Memory” by Rodriguez.
The entry discussed the 1) Relationship between home and school & 2) private v.s. public, relating to my own life and experience.

As we discussed in class, education will undermine the relationship in family while threat members of the family’s authority. For example: Student A’s grandma doesn’t speak English and one day, she was asked to visit school. So now student A plays an interpreter’s role. Teacher should always remember to look at Grandma instead of the interpreter, for the respect and manner. This is the same rule for interviewing with interpreter.

Student Grandma

Teacher

Language is the power code and after Rodriguez grasped the code, he felt ashamed of his family, so as to separate his public life from private life. The tragedy happened because of the malformed society value and the conflict between mainstream and minority. The tragedy is still happening and won’t disappear unless the world is absolutely equal and even. A lot of bilingual immigrants’ children as I know are with the dual memberships – family self and public self. The family self is for the family and parents, while the public self is for the friends, for the school, for the social occasions.

Language 1 <-> concept/thing /shape <-> Language 2

It’s just lucky to be in Hawaii, where all people are minority, all people have accent and all people are proud of their cultures.

Chinese Pod - Post #2

Hei folks, have a great blog to share!
http://chinesepod.com/

Chinese Pod is a language training service unlike anything I have ever seen before. It works by taking the best of the traditional classroom, and recreating it around the needs and lifestyle of the student, with all the improvements that technology allows.







It provides a community of practice: great teachers, lively discussion with fellow students, and a shared learning experience.

However, Chinese Pod supports learning in ways that a traditional school is unable to do. For example:
Bookmark the lessons you want to study, and have them delivered daily through the personal RSS feed.
Study on the go: can put the lessons on the iPod or mobile phone.
Tag: The user can tag my vocabulary lists, then the related words tagged by others can be found.
Comment: Can feel the real classroom in this integrated Blog.

It also allows users to sign up and create their own blog.
I found Professor Yao’s book with the lessons in MP3 by some Chinese language fans!
Integrated Chinese: http://blogs.chinesepod.com/integrated-chinese/

Right now, I am working on a website for Chinese Language Education Association in Hawaii. Chinese Pod is an on line integrated learning blog, which inspire me about the site I am working on. Blog can be considered as a part of that website, for teachers to share the ideas about teaching. But I might use more videos than audio, since I believe that visual learning is more efficient and attractive in language teaching and learning.

Copyright Address for Kids

A website about copyright for kids.
Teaching kids about copyright laws
Hope it helps for educators . =)

Ed. Journal - 1st Entry of Ed. Journal

The education “tag” starts from the multicultural education class I am taking in spring 2008 and will be continuing since the life journal is a journal of educating and being educated.

Why multicultural education matters?
I am staring blankly to this question for a while multicultural in education is beyond dispute in this mixed culture world.

What is culture?
Culture is not limited by the behavior and product of the people or patterns in people’s life; it is the shared beliefs, feelings and values of a community of people.
From Hiebert, Dimensions of culture:

The misunderstandings of multicultural education or communication are based on ignorance of the beliefs, feelings and values of another culture. The solution is to learn how the other culture works. As a teacher, preparing ourselves as a cross-cultural educator so that when the student in our classroom is from the other culture or minority, teacher won’t show the attitude of “making no sense to us”.

Suppose there is a student in class believes in Jehovah's Witness. The teacher should know the basic religion background of Jehovah’s Witness; have some concept of do’s and don’ts for the classroom activities. If possible, ask the assistant from parents for additional support.

At last, the MCE class is not only for preparing the potential teachers to be sensitive for the students from different cultures, but also preparing the curriculum with a global perspective.