The Finale!

Well, the year's over! We still managed to have a great discussion today, despite it being the last day! I especially enjoyed the conversation I had when discussing my philosophy during the finals meeting because it gave me another chance to explore the ideals that I've established throughout the semester.

One core value that I spoke about was the belief that if you hold students to a higher standard, then they are more likely to reach that level of success. What I didn't necessarily think of, however, was how to get students to reach a higher level of success without giving additional work or causing students to feel overwhelmed by the subject. I was able to discuss various ideas during the meeting and further analyze how this situation would apply to my everyday teaching. One question brought to my attention was how you can have a high level of expectation for students without giving them busy work. We were able to discuss methods of keeping students ineterested and eager to learn so that busy work won't be required and students will want to learn more about whatever subject and reach the goals that you set for them.

Current Events

This past week in class, we began discussing ideas that could be taught to students. During this activity, our group started to discuss the idea of using the current oil spill in classrooms as a teaching subject. Each teacher in different core subject classrooms could spend time discussing many different sides of the argument and relate it to all of the subjects for the students.

This conversation evolved into the observation that a current events topic could be incorporated into all classes every semester. In my personal experience, the thing that I lacked in my education as a child was exposure and knowledge of current events. Typically, I was a very good student and studied/learned everything that needed to be known in class, but I didn't waste my time learning about the things happening in the world at that time because I didn't believe it was necessary since it was not required of me as a student. Given the chance to create a curriculum for a general classroom for younger students, I would allot several days in each semester to which a current events topic could be discussed whenever it presented itself and would try to incorporate the event into multiple subjects.