Group Blog Post: Examples of Each authors concerns as it relates to “Chalk”

Amanda Rogers, Erin Lowzowski, Katy Helfrick, Donna Thornell

In The Banking Concept of Education, Polo Freire expresses concern that students in our public school system are suffering from “narration sickness.” One scene that gives a clear example of this issue was when Mr. Lowry was in front of the class, having the students repeat a passage written on the board. The students showed absolutely no interest, and were unengaged in the lesson.

John Gatto explains in his article Against School, that schools are becoming more like prisons.He talks about school breeding childish people. “Our schools” he says, “with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers- as virtual factories of childishness.” A scene relating to this issue was when Coach Webb chased a student down for being (not even) one second late. She gets angry at his teacher for not punishing him, and tells the teacher she is taking the student to the office.

In Mike Rose’s blog post Resolutions Someone Should Make for 2011 He talks about how we need to stop relying on charter schools, and other expensive options, to provide our students with an exceptional education. In his words, we need to “Stop looking for the structural or technological magic bullet- whether its charter schools or value-added analysis- that will improve education.” In a scene from Chalk, Mr. Stroope was asked by someone from administration, whether he had reached his improvement goals for the year. He talked about how he needed to work on his Sarcasm, cleanliness, organization, and lesson plans. Mr. Stroope said "kids like it on the fly". This shows that if we improve the quality of our teachers, we will not need to rely on expensive private schools any longer.


Lewis Blacks explains in his Education Crisis video that our test scores in America are not high, however, we excel greatly in our confidence level. A scene that provides an example of this concern was when Mr. Stroops pulls Alex out of the classroom and basically tells her to stop being so smart. He admits to her that she probably knows more than him, but not to act like it. She would roll her eyes, and scoff and thing he would say, Proving her self-confidence level was high.