Hair

Luther College's production of Hair was phenomenal. Hair brought up issues that have to deal with giving into societal norms and conforming or in this case resisting it. After watching Hair, my thoughts of connecting it to Ed psych were based around two general ideas. First, Hair had me thinking about students and the pressures of teachers, other students, and the whole entire system that are put on them. This creates groups like the main group in Hair, that are pressuring students to fight it, "damning" the man. This attitude can cause students to fail in the system, and while the system is obviously not perfect, failing in it causes a person's life to be a lot harder in getting ahead at all, because our society is run by those people who run the school systems. Secondly, I thought about teacher's contributions to education. With so many guidelines set up by the national government, the state government, the local government, and then local administrators; teachers often feel they have no room for individual classroom pace. Teaching off of what the students need, is a concept that is so simple, but can hardly be done because teachers are told what they have to teach and when they have to do it. Taking individual steps and being strong enough to stand up for students' rights and needs to learn, is what the passion in every teacher needs to produce to create a successful learning environment.

Freedom Writers

This movie did not not relate to Educational Psychology in anyway. Everything the teacher did was inspiring to pre-service teachers. In the movie the main character pushes every envelop with the school to provide a better education for her students. While doing this she is faced with personal challenges of trying to figure out how to connect to the students given her completely different background. Attending college in Decorah and growing up in a small town, if I am to teach in an intercity school I believe I would have these same challenges. This movie especially connects to ed psych by showing an example for a teacher to go above and beyond to get the material to relate to the students. That's what I believe, as teachers, we are called to do.