April 29, 2008: Guest Speacker Vickie Bruno

I appreciate Vickie for coming in and enlightening us with her expertise.  Learning to speak different languages has always been an interest to me.  I have a long road ahead of me before I become fluent in the Spanish and Navajo languages, but the important thing is that I’m more than willing to learn.  I am very interested in learning how to sign as well.  It’s interesting how we, in some sense, force people to learn how to communicate in the “NORM” language (English), but fail to encourage or force English language users to learn how to communicate in other languages that are apart of our culture.  My grandfather speaks Navajo fluently and my husband is able to communicate, using limited measures of the Navajo language, but is always seeking fluency.  It makes me proud to see my grandfather and husband share their love and knowledge of the Navajo language with our little ones.  My children and I have been learning the Spanish language together and we have had a lot of fun.  Now the next step will be introducing sign language into our linguistic journey!    

May 1, 2008

For the life of me I cannot remember our guest speaker’s name!  Anyway, I found her presentation and the research very interesting.  It was interesting to hear that misconceptions fuel early abuse due to the fact that students are not being acknowledged for their truthful being in to which they eventually become the label that they are given.  I have observed this kind of misconception within certain classrooms that pertain to behavior:  Example:  There were a few students misbehaving in class.  The teacher gave them warnings, they did not listen.  For their consequence she made the entire class, even the students who were behaving, write a one page paper about the proper way to act in class.  What kind of message is she sending to the students who were abiding by classroom rules???  I wonder if they have become the label that they were inadequately given?  I will have to go in again and observe the result of this teacher’s classroom management strategy.  It will be interesting to see how the behaved students have changed over the semester.  I will keep you posted on this.  I really value the advice on teaching our students about social and community norms.  Giving the students a chance to evaluate statistics on what’s hot and what’s not will “make the majority feel proud, and the minority feel small”, which will help the minority become aware of their own misconception and hopefully encourage them to start making good choices.  Overall, I truly enjoyed the presentation and the speaker gave us all great ideas that we can implement within our future classrooms.