This week's discussion got me thinking a lot about my AP Language and Composition class in high school. I already spoke about it a little bit in the discussion, but I want to further elaborate on WHY it was as great as it was.
All of the students in my class had heard from kids the year before how hard the material was and how mean the teacher was. We were told that we would be slandered in class, told we didn't know what we were talking about... that our teacher would count and take off points for every :"like" or "uh" or "um" uttered during a presentation. We were told an A was less common than an F in this class. Finally, we were told that the teacher was crazy. Absolutely, intensely crazy.
During the first semester, I saw students get torn up during their presentations. Our teacher would sit Indian-style on top of her desk and belch out loud, offending maybe of the students in the class. You were given points for how many times you spoke during a Socratic Seminar, but no one wanted to speak because we were all terrified of being told "You better have text to support that" or "Where the heck did you get that idea from?" Every time she printed something, she would make a farting noise and yell "It's coming out of the 'puter from the interwebs!"
When we read A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, a satire proposing that citizens eat their children to save money, we walked in the find a baby doll hanging from the ceiling by a string. Needless to say, we were terrified.
Throughout the duration of the semester, however, she slowly softened. A poem that a student wrote made her cry in class. She was caring and compassionate, and every student in the class began to really love her. Sure, she was weird, and gross, but that was part of her charm. By the end of the fall semester, she was everyone's favorite teacher, but you had to work harder to pass her class that you did to get an A in any other. And the funny thing was, we didn't mind the work!
At the end of the semester, we read Machiavelli's The Prince, specifically, the chapter that asks if it is better to be feared or loved to be a good leader. As we read, we saw that the best strategy to being a good leader is to begin by making people fear you, and then proceeding to make them love you so that they will work hard but also be loyal to you. We were all astounded that our teacher had used this strategy on us. It was crazy! And so cool to see an educator using what she taught us in class in her career. It was inspiring to see that we were the proof of this very old strategy. This is one of the fascinating experiences that I had with education that made me want to be a teacher.
.........................
..
.
Long-story-short, this class made it apparent to me what a MAKEOVER some (if not all) sectors of education need. Like the TED Talk by Dave Meyers says, math needs a makeover too, as well as other STEM subjects.
--------------
This, once again, puts me in mind of my Learning Gate experience. It's weird that I keep going back to that, but it's true. This one is in a different light than my previous posts:
I remember in my 3rd grade class, the required reading was Life of Pi. This book has since been made into a very popular movie and many people my age are just now reading the book. When I read it at the time, I got absolutely nothing out of it. I now have no desire to pick it up again because I was so bored with it, and honestly, didn't hardly understand it at all when I read it the first time.
I've heard the book is fantastic, and I believe it is. I think I read the book before I was ready for it. This brings me back to the quote from How People Learn: "children's brains may be more ready to learn different things at different times." I think that as future teachers, we need to be very aware of the audience and what they are capable of taking in. I think my teacher made a big mistake by choosing the book that she did for our age group. It is not enough that the content is great or that you love it as a teacher. Rather, it is important to be aware of what students can and cannot do because otherwise, something that would be perfectly learnable later in life can be absolutely ruined.
I think that many of the topics discussed in the last few weeks can be viewed in light of all learning. For example, though I was reading and not necessarily doing math or directly doing science (though we would discuss scientific theme throughout the book), I think we can look to some vocab to illustrate why this failed as a classroom assignment.
For example, there was no articulation whatsoever. Articulation is when a teacher works to have students verbalize their knowledge or thinking on the matter. I think if we would have discussed the book in a Socratic Seminar method, maybe I would’ve received more out of it. Instead, reading the book on my own, I didn't learn anything let alone do I remember anything.
The classroom environment was completely not community-centered, which is when the community in the classroom is constructed in such a way to benefit learning. I think this goes hand-in-hand with the articulation. By articulating in a Socratic Seminar format, we could have built a classroom community.
Additionally, there were many other techniques discussed this week that were never used in my classroom, and I didn't get nearly as much out of the experience as there was potential for.
No comments:
Post a Comment