Aiello
Writing Dan 205
Professor Cronin
31 March 2011
Reflective Essay
For Unit two in writing 205 we were told to read The Shame of the Nation by Jonathan
Kozal and complete various assignments throughout the unit which were mainly group based
activities. My group contained me, Ricky DArrigo, Robert Axelrod and Tatiana Brito. As a
group we worked pretty effectively overall. For our first assignment we were asked to present the
first three chapters of the book to the class and summarize them and pick a suggested topic to
relate to the book and talk about it. For this project I would have to say we presented very well
however the only thing I had to complain about was that we would not all be on the same track
during the presentation because we never really went over what we were going to talk about
during our parts. The next assignment for the unit was the booklet which we had to pick a topic
we picked the No Child Left Behind Act for and then we had to decide on an audience and we
decided on congress. When deciding how to set up the booklet our group was quick on deciding
what to report on and what style our booklet would be in. For the booklet Tatiana wrote a piece
on a picture, Robert wrote a letter and objective of our booklet, Ricky wrote the history part and I
wrote the part on how congress has to change the act and also design the booklet. We also had to
present on our booklet before it was due and explain why we used certain colors and why we
decided on the audience and that went very well. Everyones work was always submitted in a
timely matter and I believe our quality of work was never lack luster.
For our booklet we decided to claim that the No Child Left Behind Act sets the bar for
education too low. In our booklet I believe the part where we talk about actually changing the
Act really points out this claim the best and thats why we chose it be to at the end. The parts
before the last part just tell u whats wrong with the Act while the final part shows you what
needs to be done with the act. In our booklet we decided to use only three visuals because this
was meant to be a very professional piece to convince congress to reform the act. We decided as
a group that more images would decrease the professionalism of out booklet. The political
cartoon we picked for the beginning with the boy staying at the low bar just sets the tone to our
whole booklet. And we decided out of the three images we would use a graph which showed how
much each states spends on education and we really believe we picked the right images for out
booklet and most effective. When it came to referencing images to the text we used a
professional system of saying in the text to look at the image which is a technique used in
textbooks and professional journals. When deciding on the font and colors of the booklet we
went with larger text because congress men are usually older men and have trouble seeing and
we decided to go with patriotic color red white and blue. And for the font we decided to go with
times new roman because it looks very professional.
When our group decided to report on the issue I was hesitant however, when I started to
read articles on the internet I started to see that this act really does cause the bar to be set low by
America. I grew up in New York State and I always thought we were the only state to use
standardized testing but through research I saw that the No Child Left Behind Act actual
mandates it. Throughout high school I never agreed with standardized tests because I always felt
teachers spent too much time teaching students on how to take the tests rather than the actual
material. So in all doing this booklet it really made me realize that the No Child Left Behind Act
indeed needs some reform.