Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Talking Point #10

"If the aim of intellectual training is to form the intelligence rather than to stock the memory, and to produce intellectual explorers rather than mere erudition, then traditional education is manifestly guilty of a grave deficiency"

What this is saying is that if out goal is to make everyone intellectually more capable rather than having everything just be memorization, then our traditional education needs to be fixed. I personally can vouge that the traditional education system right now is based mainly on memorization. Once in awhile you might have a good teacher that actually teaches, but for the most part you get teachers who read off notes, might do an example or two, and then give you a quiz in hopes that you know it. So as a student, all you can do is quickly memorize the material and then take the quiz and then relax from the topic because you'll never go over it again. A few days after the quiz you will forget all about what you had "learned". So this quote is saying that we need to break away from that, and to make everyone more intellectually smart, and want to perhaps explore these teachings on their own to broaden their mind. Our job is to provoke curiosity, not pain and boredom.

"If the students task is to memorize rules and existing knowledge, without questioning the subject matter or the learning process, their potential for critical thought and action will be restricted."

This quote backs up the previous quote. But like it is saying, usually all it takes is just backing up and asking simple questions like "what does this mean to you" and "how does this happen". This encourages the students to refer to previous knowledge or starts up their critical thinking process, which could in the end help them understand the material better and also make them more interested. You cant just assume everyone is an expert and just know everything you are talking about, therefore reading off a slide and hoping something catches will not help any student in the long run.

"Participation is the most important place to begin because student involvement is low in traditional classrooms and because action is essential to gain knowledge and develop intelligence."

A class that is eager to participate is a class that is eager to learn. Students who like to show off their knowledge should be rewarded (like they are at my elementary school) and hearing what students have to say should always be encouraged. Usually what I hear is "there is no such thing as a stupid question", and to me I think that actually helps. That is because many students are afraid to participate because they don't want to sound stupid in front of all of their peers. So saying that phrase could break them out of their shell and eventually make them an active participant in the classroom. Participation is still encouraged in college as a good portion of your grade. That is because teachers know that participation is key to get students engaged to the class and hopefully encourage them to learn. The problem is though that schools still don't encourage participation, so instead they just sit around and take notes or goof off. So maybe when we some day fix the teaching style, that will also effect the amount of participation in a good way.

Overall I found this to be a good article. What helped was that this topic can apply to any situation. The article wasn't too difficult to read and parts caught my interest. I hope that a way is found to make learning more fun and helpful, rather than boring and pointless. A lot of things that we learn already will probably never be used again, so if there was a way to take out all of the pointless stuff and keep the important stuff, then we could use the extra time to make a bigger impact in the important areas and perhaps instill the information into the students mind for a much longer time. Then perhaps overall interest in school will go up too and less students will drop out or fail out as well.

3 comments:

  1. I totally agree with your quote on participation. I have used the same quote aswell. I feel participation is a huge part it teh learning experience.

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  2. Reading your blog really cleared up some issues I had with the reading. The participation quote is really good. Thanks for helping me out.

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  3. Participation is very important and I have really learned that through this class. Seeing that we had no tests or papers made me very skeptical that I would learn much. However I have probably learned more from this class than from a lot of other classes.

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