Thinking about Buchmann

I took a weekend to go to Eastern WA, to see family I haven't seen since Christmas (!) and while I was there I was pretty much internet free. I had this weird feeling like I was disconnected, because I was offline. In the back of my mind I was thinking "I should journal about this!" and then I came home and sadly forgot most of what I wanted to blog about. The pitfalls of not having the internet on hand, all the time.
One thing I really wanted to blog about last week was my reaction to Buchmann. I had to reread parts of it, because the first time around I read what she was saying completely wrong. I thought she was for standardized tests and shaping young minds to be robotic. I really read into it incorrectly. I actually think I might have ripped into her a little bit in my journal last week, so I wanted to take the chance to reflect on what she was actually saying, and why I interpreted it the way that I did. Buchmann had the interests of students in mind when she was writing that piece, and in a nutshell, she wanted to make sure that it was understood that what is taught ought to be determined by what is in the best interests of the student. I think I interpreted it in the way that I did because I interpret standards as just being a given. Maybe because of my own experience in schools, but I always assumed that all teachers had to teach the same things, and that subjects were fulfilled by requirements that are necessary to graduate. It never crossed my mind that there was the potential for certain teachers to decide to teach or to not teach certain subjects based on their own likes/ dislikes/ comfort level of subjects. So I didn't considered that, and I assumed that Buchmann was very pro standardized testing and anti project based learning. Sometimes it's good to do a reread.
Another thing I was thinking about this weekend is gardening! I did a lot of that this weekend (so many types of tomatoes! Yes!) and I remembered a class I took through Pipeline at UW Seattle where we were able to volunteer in elementary classrooms where we had a guest speaker come in from a school that had a garden that they incorporated into the curriculum. It was amazing! There were elementary school students and middle school students learning to garden, learning where food came from, doing hands on fun activities, etc. It was something that the students really, really enjoyed doing and they were learning from a plethora of subject areas. I also remember that our guest speaker had a blog, and it will be my mission this week to find it again!