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Maura Costello Education 610 Zero Tolerance

It should not take a serious violent incident in a school to make people aware of the downward spiral of the behavior of students in America’s public schools. Everyday teachers are faced with students that are defiant, disrespectful and unruly in a classroom with many other students trying to learn at the same time. In today’s society manners and morals are life lessons that have been somehow passed on to the schools systems and the teachers. So not only is it the teacher’s job to guide the students in the content of the day, but at the same time it is the teacher’s role to teach and maintain a respectful environment. It is also the teacher’s job to control behaviors that in a classroom prevent the other students from learning because of the distractions of students that have a difficult time controlling their actions or for some reason just don’t care about their actions or the consequences of those actions. Zero tolerance policies remove students from the school when they cannot be controlled in the classroom. What Zero tolerance also does is give those other students who are managing to control their behavior and managing to not be unruly a chance to learn without distraction. Every person should have the right to learn with distraction and without feeling threatened by other students. In the past few years students have somehow forgotten that school is not only the place they go to get shelter, food and sometimes even clothing but a place where they are supposed to be learning and gaining an education for their future. The students who create the problems in school do also have the right to a fair education as well but there need to be consequences to certain situations, especially those situations that endanger the lives of the teacher, themselves and the other students.

 Kelly McCaffrey Chapter 13 Technology and Learning: Enabling or Subverting? I was born in 1979. When I was very young, my parents used a typewriter to type letters. In the 80’s, word processors became popular and my parents eventually purchased one when I was in middle school. The word processor had only two functions; typing and printing. I remember using it for the first time and being amazed that you could correct your mistakes on a screen before printing it out. Prior to the word processor, I either wrote my papers by hand or used the type writer. To “delete” my mistakes I used erasable pen or correction tape. I set up my first e-mail account my freshman year of college and had to go to the computer lab to check my e-mail. One girl in our dorm had a computer and there was always a line to use it. In 1999, my second year of college, my family purchased our first computer. Since then, the rapid changes in technology have been overwhelming and exciting. At first, I only used the computer for e-mail. I now use my own laptop for just about everything. Children today are born into a world that is run by technology. Some see technology as a negative thing that is taking over our world. But whether we like it or not, it is indeed taking over our world. Technology is unavoidable and cannot be ignored. Our children are using it and will continue to use it throughout their lives. As teachers, we should embrace this change and embrace the benefits of technology. Of course, there are indeed many negative impacts as well. Children no longer communicate the way they used to. Texting has taken over. Video games are an obsession for many. Cyber-bullying is more common than anyone would like to believe. Many of these things, however, can be controlled and would not be happening if parents monitored their children better. Simple things like not allowing a child to be on a computer behind closed doors, monitoring cell phone use, and restricting the amount of video game time for a child could drastically reduce the negative effects technology is having on our children. The benefits, however, outweigh the risks. The amount of information a child now has at his or her fingertips is inconceivable. Computers, Smartboards, wikis, blogs, online learning videos, Google, powerpoints, learning websites, academic games, online books, teachers websites, online grading, and e-mail are just a few examples of how technology is extremely beneficial to teaching and learning. Some will argue that the old fashioned way of teaching and learning, before technology even existed, is better. Children should know how to look up information in a library and do research with an actual book. There is concern about how easy it is to plagiarize now. Students also rarely write; everything is typed. While I agree that there is a certain value to these traditional ways, I think it is important that we, as teachers, embrace the advantages of technology and use it with our students because it is not going away.