Part Four: 1980-200 THE BOTTOM LINE

Part four of the book "School" talked about children going to school in the "new age." These children were seeing more of a reform. Kids in Harlem had schools that had different types of specialized schools in them. This was also a time of when low income students could get a voucher to go to a private or religious private school. This would also be the beginning of the start of mandatory testing in every grade.

I think that we have come a long way with schooling and teaching kids. We still have a long way to go but this book has really showed us how far we have come. This chapter showed us that it was still only a few decades ago that we, still did not know what to do or how to properly teach kids, but we are lowly improving what we can do to move forward.

On 9/25/18 we had a chalk talk in class. We ere separated into groups and had to write things down a piece of oak tag, if you will. We had to write down things that we had read in section 3 of our book “School” however, the catch is is that we could not talk to one another. We had to write down our thoughts and we had one person in our groups that would circle what people had written down and anyone would have to expand more on what that person had written about. 

Now personally, I was never really a fan of chalk talk because I never really know how to be broad. I always have to write or even orally tell stories or give explanations in a way that gives ever little detail, no matter how much or how little it would effect a story. On the piece of oak tag that we were given I wanted to talk about the Latinos down in Texas and how they fought for bilingual rights, however everyone else was talking about the major issues such as segregation and Title IX. While those topics are very important, I believe that I focused on the smaller issues because I never knew that they were happing during the same time period as segregation. I wanted to ask the people that I was working with if that was what we were supposed to the writing about but we could not speak to each other. 

Even when it came time to talk out loud in front of the whole class, I got scared. I even started to second guess if I read section 3, which I know that I did because I knew all of the topics for that section.Chalk talk is interesting, but I still get confused if I should or shouldn’t be specific.