This week I learned that I need to be clearer on exactly why I teach, and even more specifically why I chose to teach my content area (science) and my age group (middle school). In the preface to “Teaching, Learning and Assessment Together” Dr. Ellis states that why you teach is more important than who or what you teach. And Herbert Kohl’s “Why teach” laid out some great questions to answer. I definitely need to develop a better “why I teach” statement. And it looks like I’ll have the opportunity as part of the group project…
The lecture taught me/helped me remember the large goals of education in general: academic knowledge, citizenship, self-realization, career/job preparation. It also reinforced what I knew about different modes of instruction and the different roles that stakeholders can play in education. I know that sometimes it’s easy for me to fall into the teacher as provider of knowledge and student as absorber of knowledge role, especially when I am overwhelmed (which is often). But I need to remember that my ultimate goal is to have students as active learners, and for me to be a guide.
This week I also learned that the idea of students as active learners is at least a century old. Whitehead’s “Aims of Education” paper from 1916 was full of great ideas that are still relevant today. As I stated in my discussion post I was especially inspired by this quote: “Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilization of knowledge.” Sometimes I really struggle with some of the content that I am required to teach – why exactly do students need to know this specific fact? Maybe the problem is that I’m not really asking the students to DO anything with their knowledge.
And this week I also learned that different people have different reasons for wanting to teach (which, I guess is pretty obvious). This was evident from all of the discussion posts that I read – they varied from “everyone in my family is a teacher” to “I am driven to work with early elementary students” (not direct quotes). The readings from “Educational Foundations” also reinforced this. I loved Frank McCourt’s essay – I often find that students LOVE to hear personal stories from me, and I think that some time spent showing students that I’m a person is worth missing instructional time. It pays off in better relationships with my students. A lot of my classmates seemed inspired by “The Green Monongahela”, but for some reason it didn’t really do much for me. But I guess we all respond to different things. The excerpt from “Death at an Early Age” was very disturbing to me. It made me wish that I had a time machine to go back to help Stephen. If Kozol was trying to make people angry and spur action, hopefully he succeeded.
