EDU 6526 Week 7 Values and citizenship August 22, 2010

Values and citizenship has always been something I attributed to parents and upbringing.  I feel like I have good values and practice good citizenship.  I am a nice person and I like to help others when I can.  I know where I get these traits.  I can’t say whether they were taught or caught.  I got in trouble when I did bad things a a kid.  So perhaps I was taught in some ways.  I hung around people who I would consider good people, so maybe I caught some that way.  I believe in both taught and caught in terms of values and citizenship.  I would have to give more weight to caught in terms of values.  Kids are always watching.  Their parents, relatives, friends, and pretty much everyone else.  When a child sees a parent yell at a sporting event or be mean to another adult or child they may see that as acceptable behavior and try to imitate it.  Children are good at imitating adults and other influential people.  Unfortunately many of those role models today are music artists, reality T.V. personalities, and athletes that exhibit poor behavior.  We as teachers have the responsibility to model good behavior to our students, unfortunately our modeling tends to happen in a fairly narrow set of circumstances.  When we see out students we are in a position of authority.  Even so, we are in good positions to both model and teach values and citizenship to our students.

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