This blog was written from the perspective of an educator, and a parent, which I found to be very interesting. The post inparticular that I read (and all of the comments that followed), was titled And What Do YOU Mean By Learning?. The first part talks about how this man's daughter, Tess, joined her school's track team, and the coach is making her do the high jump, and she is terrible at it but she wants to be better. Tess wants to high jump, and failing at it is apart of her learning process because she is so driven to get it right. She is used to playing team sports, but the high jump is different because she can't rely on her team to make her jump higher. Her sucess is strictly dependent on her.
The second part of this blog is about school and things he has seen in his classroom. Like Tess trying to high jump, a student's success is directly effected by how hard they try, and that is an extension of how interested they are, or how much they want to learn about a subject. This blog then goes into asking how we can find out what our students are passionate about so they are more driven to learn. It discusses that college is not for everyone, and I have to agree. Niether of my parent went to college, because it wasn't for them, but we can (thankfully) live comfortably. If more students are able to find something they're passionate about at a younger age, would they be able to take classes that high school be more meaningful to them? Would my parents have liked school better and found a major in a University somewhere that was for them? My father is a retried cop, who just passed high school, but passed the police academy exams and eventually the Sergants exams just fine.
This blog asked other educators how we can make school more personalized and meaningful so our students want to be there, and they want to learn. One educator suggested that this answer lies with our k-8 teachers, who should be able to unvail student passions at an earlier age, that way when high school comes around the classes they are taking plays directly into their interests and futures so they dont have to experiment with classes to see what they like with only 4 years until they graduate into the real world, or continue on experimenting with 4 more years of (pricey) schooling. When I came to Slippery Rock for orientation I was told that the average SRU student changes majors 3 times. Would we be able to lessen this number if teaching was more personalized in grade school?
I do think that a more personalized approach to teaching would solve part of the problem. If student's don't care then they don't learn and it is our job as educators to make them care. I think that we have to be realistic though. Not every lesson will reach every student, but the hope is that they will be touched by at least something that I do, or that another teacher does. That way they will feel connected and may not be so indecisive about everything else.
ReplyDeleteI found this post highly insightful. I liked the part about figuring out what our students are passionate about so they will, most likely, be further interested to learn about a certain topic. Blogs such as these are truly an engaging experience because we as teachers can learn various teaching styles or examples to integrate into our own classroom. Maybe I can make a blog dedicated to novels where my students can research their favorite novel and then write about what they've learned (concerning author, subject, genre, etc). Distinguishing interests at an early age will assist students in high school so they can figure out what they may want to major in in college, if anything at all.
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