Week 3: January 25th and January 27th

In class this week we did a group project where we had to do research on a 9/11 conspiracy. Doing this taught us how to work as a team and how to research properly, which is a very beneficial skill to know when it comes to writing essays. Outside of class we read a passage in Longman Reader about the tragedies of September 11 written by a man who was working in the towers. I really enjoyed this passage, it made me tear up. We also read an article about a picture of a man jumping out of one of the towers. It was a very powerful article and it kept me interested the entire time. In order to work on our researching skills, SBS had us research and find sources which were credible and not credible. I found this to be very helpful because when I was writing my paper, sometimes it's hard to tell what is credible or not and this really helped me decipher that. The discussion forum we did this week we were able to choose to write about groupthink or morality in the classroom, I chose morality:

I disagree that modern education fails to teach morality. I do not think the direct issues Sykes writes of, are a cause of this. Teaching children morals should not be solely placed on schooling and that is where our society is substandard. While volunteering in many elementary schools, I have witnessed elementary education firsthand teaching multitudes of lessons regarding morality. If these morals are not implemented at home, why do we expect these children to have a strong moral compass? The problem lies within our society as well as solely within the parenting skills. I do believe direct lessons on morality seem to seize after elementary school. However as the students develop more maturity, moral lessons are taught in less straight-forward ways. For example “schools have a moral ethos embodied in rules, rewards and punishments, dress codes, honor codes, student government, relationships, styles of teaching, extracurricular emphases, art, and in the kinds of respect accorded students and teachers”. (Nord, and Haynes)Would it really be necessary for more advanced levels of schooling to have to plan out lessons as to what is right and wrong? By the time a student enters middle school, educators justifiably assume the outline of moral standards has already been instilled. I believe all they can really do is to provide expectations of these students and to leave the rest up to themselves and the ways they’re parented.
I found this book online at the website http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/198190/chapters/Moral_Education.aspx

I think the lessons this week were one of my favorites, I really enjoyed the topics and the way SBS tied it all together to teach us even more lessons that will be valuable to us when we create our papers.