Welcome to my page!

My name is Christine Hahn and I am a wearer of many hats. I am a new Mom, a soon to be wife,and a pursuer of education just trying to find her way in this world. I love to travel as much as possible, to eat deliciously fattening foods, spend time with my family (sometimes!), make my son laugh until he can hardly stand it, and sky dive in gorgeous places.

I have created this blog as an assignment for a college course I am taking. I am doing this in effort to learn how to better understand the technology that is available to us and to be an effective teacher for my future students. I hope to one day be teaching in an elementary school setting, somewhere between kindergarten and third grade. I have a love for computers but very minimal experience working with blogs, html, etc. I hope that through this class I will gain a better understanding of how this all works so that I can eventually teach it to someone else.. clearly! :)

Happy trails!



Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Blog Following 101 -

I think what I am learning most about following blogs based on education issues is that I have to take everything that I read with a grain of salt. With that said, I am completely frustrated reading the majority of the blogs that I have been following. The frustration does not stem from the bloggers themselves but rather the information that they are sharing.

The NCLB has and always will be a hot topic for educators until it has been addressed in a manner that is beneficial for everyone. When I say everyone I mean children, parents, educators, administrators, and political heads. I find it incredibly unfortunate that the future of children (and teachers!) has been left to the scores of standardized tests. One of the more recent blog postings that I read from the blogger that I follow posted an article about how the "Fed's" are now thinking about testing children in preschool. PRESCHOOL! Without getting too political on this topic, it has to do with Obama's, "Race to the Top" program. You can go to this link and read more specifics about it. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2011/07/_to_compete_states_must.html

What does this mean for me as a teacher in the future? I feel that it means as a teacher I will be teaching even LESS to the children and more AT the children. At what point is someone going to step in and say that enough is enough? The United States is a leader in many ways in this world, but I hate to say that I am not sure we are doing much good for our children by teaching to a test rather than truly educating our children and setting them up for the best possible future. After all, we always hear that teachers are "educating our future", but what does that mean for us as a society if all we are doing is racing to the top? Not to mention what that means for teachers who are more interested in claiming "prize" money rather than truly educating students.
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2 comments:

  1. Brianna PhillipsJuly 17, 2011 at 2:39 PM

    You tell em'! This reminds me of the daily conversations we had in EDFN 304! When are they going to realize that testing is not the only key to success, and the only thing that shows if you are a good teacher... pretty ridiculous I must agree!

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  2. ArielJuly 17, 2011 at 5:33 PM

    I love this post, you make some excellent points about a highly debated topic. I couldn't agree more with what you said about us teaching 'to' the children versus 'at' them. I feel like the U.S. needs to re-evaluate our approach to reforming education, yes we are falling behind but is testing in PRESCHOOL the answer? I think it's going to make our children less motivated to learn and more stressed out about meeting all these 'standards'. Negative experiences with school early on in life will not set these children up for success.

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