Learning outside of School?

Is learning outside of school really a viable option for students? I am personally very against this idea as i feel schools should be providing adaptions for students. Schooling i believe is very important as a child not even  based on learning as more of a way to understand society. When in school you meet many new friends and begin to understand how friendship, relationships, and even people you dislike work. You begin to understand the real world and what type of people you will be dealing with for your whole life. That being said I think after middle school students should be able to decide for themselves what path they should go down.

Its very possible to learn and be a very “successful” person while teaching yourself outside of school especially in the world of vast information we live in today. My issue with this is its hard to get a job to support yourself without even a high school degree in the real world.  Most business look at it as a form tat you were able to finish the tasks placed before you as well as you being responsible enough to finish what the world defines as required information you need to learn. The problem isn’t what your learning outside of the classroom its the pieces of paper you need to “prove your worth” to society.

We as teachers need to make school a more viable option for all students regarding what they wish to do in their future. That being said int his class we did a Independent learning project with broad guidelines put in place by our teacher. This would be a good way to start and research more classes and other things we should implicate to help these students prepare for the careers they want over just the courses many of the students will need to take to college with them. We also need to allow our students to be more independent and creative in their work in order to help them pursue the information that will be useful to them in their future.

I feel like school is very important for many of the social skills you will need to get through life, that being said i think you have the ability to learn more and attractive more when being guided into what really matters for you as a students. We should provide less requirements or types of courses you need to graduate and more on the level of the courses. This is something we as teachers should push for in a world that has accesses to the amount of information we have just in our pockets.

2 Elephants in the Classroom that need Attention

The article 9 Elephants in the Classroom point out some very interesting issues our school systems and education process have. Out of the 9 2 really grabbed my attention because they are things we as teachers can change in the classroom.

We know that curriculum is just a guess.

Curriculum is often thought as something we have to teach and that we can tech nothing else but the curriculum. The first part is true. If the school system you work for provides a curriculum you must teach it. That does not mean on the other hand we as teachers cant teach them other useful traits of knowledge while still using the required curriculum. Like in history when learning about the stock market! We as history teachers could set up the unit to teach the history required about it as well as teaching our students about the ability to acquire and trade stock in simulators. When teaching about taxes and their implications on current government why not make the time to show them how to do the taxes as well.

We are confined to the what we are required to teach that is a fact. If we allow ourselves as teachers to become lazy that is all our students will get out of our classes. We need to incorporate more into the classroom that happens in the real world with their required studies. This is something we can change.

We know that grades, not learning, are the outcomes that students and parents are most interested in.

This one really bothered me as well. When we recognize this as a problem we need to do our best to change it. Grades are the standard for how well your child is doing in class, but not necessarily representative of where they actually are. Kids can decided not to do things in class for many reasons, but that doesn’t not mean they are actually represented in knowledge by their grade. We as teachers need to realize we are responsible and officially someone of guidance for these children. We need to be as involved as possibly with their academic life and that means being as communicative and vocal with the parents as possible. In order to help our students succeed int he real world we need to prepare them and their thoughts as much as possible for the real world.

Overall i found this article really helpful and eye opening to many of the things we will have to deal with in the classroom. We need to prepare ourselves as much as possible in order to be able to react and adapt to the situations we are thrown into as teachers. It will be very important for use to understand how to deal with many of these problems as well as avoid these situations as well.

Metaphors in the Classroom?

Using metaphors in the classroom is something that happens weather we realize it or not. This became very clear to me in the articles assigned to us for this module. Ultimately we use them to help us teach and it really will make our jobs easier in the classroom.

In the You Tube video posted below We have the ideology of what a metaphor is to understand even what I am typing is a form of a metaphor. The beginning and thin layers of what a metaphor is helps us understand that we use these things to describe something to give it a place and time to help us understand what it means.

We will use techniques like this all the time in the classroom. When the children are young we can use them to help learn how to do math and science. We can can teach with them when history when working on a long timeline to connect wars and public events thousands of years apart.

Of course this is how we teach students new languages as well. When teaching Spanish hello would be a metaphor for the word hola, and Devil would be a metaphor for the word Diablo. We can use metaphors to understand differences as well when teaching in the classroom. Explaining how the Ford industry and the Chevy industry do the same things but are owned by different companies would be a metaphor for monopolization being illegal.

Overall using metaphors in the classroom will happen whether we know they are or not. Its our job as teachers to find and use the best possible metaphors to help our students get the best example as possible while learning. In the article “Back to School Prep Guide: 8 Metaphors for a teacher” we see many metaphors of how teaching is similar to many other jobs and what they do. We can not only read these and see how to be better teachers but we can also make examples out of these to help our students under stand subjects more clearly.

Metaphors are a very important part to teaching we need to understand how to effectively use them in our classrooms to better help our students understand what we are teaching them. Not every thing requires a metaphor as well if we use this as a teaching method for everything we teach our students will be able to connect them but not be able to think of them on their own and develop there own ability to create metaphors.

Final IPL

For my last project I decided to do basic and simple Christmas cookies with my grandma this weekend. I didn’t want to get to advanced on everything because I want to use this post more as a reflection of all the work I have done this semester. As far as the cookies go they were delicious but by far not the best thing i created this semester.

The whole point of my ILP this semester was to get away from cookies and learn more about other pastries and baking techniques since i have already worked in a cookie shop. My favorite creation this semester was the ice cream cake I made a few weeks back. I love ice cream and being able to make home made ice cream and being able to mix it with cake made my week a lot better!

Over the course of this semester I made many great things and also failed int he process many times. At the beginning of our IPLs I didn’t understand why were had to do, or in a different thought, what was I gaining from this. I dint start to realize what it was until around my 3rd project. I messed up multiple times on fudge, on thought i was going to lose it. I had to go back to the store for more ingredients and even surfed the web for a possibly easier recipe.  After finally getting the fudge to set up correctly and the writing for that post began to come super easily to me.

I feel t

Photo CC by Zach

he most important project for me was when I would struggle I would always end up trying my hardest to figure out where I was going wrong because I was so invested into it. The ILPs taught me that we can teach ourselves something if we really want to know it. We can also figure out better ways for ourselves to lean on our own. If we are going to teach students and expects them to learn from what we are doing, should we not be able to teach ourselves new things as well.

Over all I thought this project was a great experience and I found it very helpful for my ideals on teaching. We are not teachers yet so their is still lots of time for use to develope our own teaching methods and thoughts, and its projects like this that  help us out the most. Hands on learning is the best learning.