January 31

We began today by reading part of an article explaining McCrory's desire to move toward more vocational track education at the university level.  For the writing into the day, we responded to this article.  Then, we watched videos about global competition and 21st century skills.  In small groups, we talked about how schools can prepare students for these 21st century skills and for working globally.  We moved into whole group discussion and talked about the McCrory article and the videos.

Discussion

• You can't dictate what someone wants to learn.  You can't make them interested in the subject, meaning the knowledge won't stick with them.
• Students need to be more focused in what they are interested in
• Schools should be asking students more about the process of finding an answer than just what the answer is.
• Students need to be taught that their opinion matters.
• If you have an opinion about a subject, it shows that you care about the subject.
• What about uniformed opinions?  Do they count?
• You can't argue something unless you know something about it.
• You can stretch statistics and the truth.
• You can't prove an opinion right or wrong.
• You can't teach the 21st century skills.  You learn it from experience, news, friends, etc.
• America is stuck up and waits a really long time to teach second languages.
• We take our education for granted.
• We should take communication classes that focus specifically on the kind of communication we will need in our job.
• Should we have general education classes?
• Should we move to have core classes that focus specifically on our future careers

After this discussion, we talked about the definition of liberal education and watched a video supporting liberal education.  As we watched the video, we noted and discussed the persuasive appeals used in the video.

Finally, we spent the last 15 minutes brainstorming for the Exploratory Proposal.

Homework:

• Read "Responding - Really Responding - to Other Students' Writing" and post a reading response.
• Start drafting your Exploratory Proposal.  The first draft is due next Thursday.