Raspberry Milanos and Orange Juice

My first two grad classes ended last week. I'm still working on a few papers, but after tomorrow afternoon I will officially be done with them. I have thoroughly enjoyed my classes and the discussions we've had in class, but towards the end of the class I got fairly frustrated. I'm not sure if it was just the nature of the two courses I was taking, or if it was the nature of education, but we just seemed to talk in circles. We spent approximately 6 weeks discussing educational theories and what is currently working/not working in our current educational model. I firmly believe that to be a good teacher it is critical to have a firm understanding of what the issues are. However, if all we ever do is talk about this issues, how is anything ever going to change? In the 6 weeks and endless conversations we had in my two classes, we never really quite got around to how to fix the issues.

I don't think anyone can argue that students that are coming from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, cultural differences, ELL students, Special Education students, and other underrepresented groups are at a distinct disadvantage. The studies have been done to back this up. It's an accepted aspect of the public school system. It's important to understand this in order to teach effectively, BUT what are we going to do about it???

In our last class discussion we were doing a general wrap up and I commented that I was frustrated because we didn't seem to discuss any possible solutions. This opened up a can of worms from many of my classmates about how easy it would be to fix if we just fixed it. I wrote in my notes - We're studying multicultural education and the myriad of difficulties and problems associated with multicultural education. Yet, we are treating it as if there is one blanket solution that will fix all these issues. It's naive and won't work.


The more I study and the more I learn, the more I'm considering going on and getting a doctorate in administration or policy or something. It's the administrators that determine the culture of the school. I'll definitely teach for a while but long term goals may be changing and shifting.