Final thoughts

Another class down, and one class closer to achieving our goal. I will not say "goodbye", just a "see you later" because I know that we will see each other down the road until we finish this goal we have for ourselves. I wish everyone good luck in your daily lives and in everything they put their mind to. See you around.

Last Blog

I found a few quotes about children that I really liked and here they are for you to enjoy!!!

We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.  ~Stacia Tauscher

Testing for Intelligence?

I don’t believe a child should be compared to another’s child development. Every child develops in different speeds and in different ways. For example; I am a teacher in an infant room and I have two children the same age (11 months) and one walks all over the room and the other is now barely taking two steps. I have another baby that at the age of 5 months could not turn over by himself or hold his head up for long periods of time.

I found an article about education in China that gives a little background of how education was viewed many years ago and how it is viewed in today’s society. With the founding of New China, numerous tasks had to be undertaken. In order to overcome the poverty and ignorance inherited from old China and gradually improve the standards of the material and cultural life of the people, the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government attached great importance to the restoration and development of education.

In the article that I found there was also this table that explains the Chinese education and assessment process and procedures.

	Elementary Education(Compulsory Education)		Secondary Education
	Primary Schooling	Junior High Schooling	Senior High Schooling
Entrance System	Children aged over 6 years in general or over 7 years in some places without qualified facility eligible for admission of primary school.	Compulsory Education Law stipulates that primary school graduates enter the junior high school nearby without any examination.	Senior high schools select the junior high school graduates based on the examinations organized by local educational administrative departments.
Schooling Years	6 years in general; 5 years in some experimental districts	3 years in general; 4 years in some experimental districts	3 years
Checks & Examinations	term-end tests year-end tests primary school graduation examinations (Chinese and mathematics are test subjects, others are checking subjects)	term-end tests year-end tests graduation examination and examination for entering higher school, such as junior high school Local province (municipality directly under the Central Government) stipulates test subjects of junior high school graduate and entering high school examination in the graduation culture disciplines range regulated by the nation.	term-end tests year-end tests senior high school graduation examination (organized by local province or municipality directly under the Central Government) the national university entrance examination (generally implemented the test reform scheme of 3+X subjects at present) (charged by university student department in Ministry of Education)
Assessment	Term-end tests, year-end tests and primary school graduation examination are devised to examine pupils’ qualified levels.	Term-end tests, year-end tests and junior high school graduation examination are devised to examine junior high school graduates’ qualified levels. Scientific assessment for examinations of graduating and entering are organized, and the assessment system of test question are set up progressively.	Term-end tests, year-end tests and senior high school graduation examination are devised to examine senior high school graduates’ qualified levels. By national university entrance examination, the proportion of students entering higher schools are regarded as the important reference of the educational quality of one teacher and one school.

I thought that the Chinese education was rigorous, studying all day without having a child life. But after looking at this chart and reading the article I come to see that the education area is really similar to the United States.  

 Reference

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EDUCATION/Resources/278200-1126210664195/1636971-1126210694253/China_Skills_Assessment.pdf

Child Stressors

The stressor that I can identify with is natural disaster. When I was a child, I remember going through hurricane Hugo. It was the worst hurricane that went through Puerto Rico. It happened September 18, 1989, I was 5 years old but remember it really clearly. We lived in a wooden house, and my parents decided to stay at my aunt’s house (which was a block house). Around that time my uncles were building a second story and left concrete blocks on the roof. The wind was so powerful that it was knocking over the blocks. I can still hear the wind, and I still remember (for the small time the adults allowed us to see out the window) how everything was flying around.

The country and region that I chose to research about is Tujuana, Mexico. This is one of the worst parts of Mexico to live in, especially for a child. I found an article from 2008 were it talks about a few children that walked through a house that had many people brutally murdered.

There were daylight shoot-outs between gangs using automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers in downtown streets and shopping malls. Kidnapping for ransom got so bad that many wealthy and middle-class families fled to the United States.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-tijuana25-2008oct25,0,2076621.story

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/18/101018fa_fact_finnegan#ixzz1OJxmKJ3U