Do You Teach, or Do You Educate?
Do You Teach or Do You Educate? is a film made by Joshua Bloom. He begins by defining "to teach" and "to educate." He also defines educator, mentor, and guide. These are the words that describe what we should be to our students. He ends the video by quoting Peter Brougham, MLK, and Socrates. My favorite quote was by MLK, and he said, "Intelligence plus character... that is the goal of true education." The reason we have educators is not only to provide the students with information, but it is also to help them build themselves as human beings.
Every day I will have to look for new ways to educate, rather than teach, my students. I'll have to find things that inspire them to learn more by making my lessons interesting and engaging, and they'll feel empowered when they accomplish the tasks I have given them. I also want to enlighten them on subjects that they knew little about by showing them different perspectives, and finally, I want to illuminate their lives with the power of learning. They should see me as someone they trust so I will have to prove to them that they can trust me. I will be their educator, mentor, and guide.
Don't Let Them Take the Pencils Home!
Don't Let Them Take Pencils Home is a blog post by John T. Spencer about students not being allowed to take pencils home because it lowers standardized test scores. He argues that this isn't a good measurement of learning. He wants to teach the students to think of pencils in a way other than as entertainment. He also taught parents the skills that he was teaching their children in hopes that it would help to alter the students' thoughts about what pencils should be used for, and the way he is teaching this to the students is by making his lessons so interesting that they can't help but want to learn.
As usual, this administrator is only focused on having high test scores, but luckily this educator, John T. Spencer, is focused on the students. He's willing to find a solution to this problem even though his administrator would rather just take the easy way out. He wants the students to actually learn, not just be able to pass some test that doesn't truly measure what they've learned. By making his lectures centered around the students, he is engaging the students and making learning interesting for them, and in the process he is teaching htem that pencils are not just for entertainment.
Did you notice that Spencer isn't actually talking about pencils? He's talking about computers!
ReplyDeleteAt first, no, I didn't. It seems crazy that I didn't catch onto that at first. I did, however, think that it was weird that they were having this argument about pencils. I should have done more research on his blog, but I didn't have the time when I was writing the post. I discussed the post with many people, though, so I began to see the metaphor, and now his post makes much more sense!
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