Blog Post 10

Do you Teach or Do you Educate?

"Education is not the filling of a vessel, but the kindling of a flame." – Socrates

When I decided to become an educator, I did it for these reasons: I could not think of another field to go into, I knew I wanted to help people learn, I wanted to be a role model, and I loved the teaching methods my elementary teachers used to teach me. I use some of their methods now when I am assigned teaching assignments. I idolized my teachers and I always said, “This is what I want to do.”
I intend to educate by students by getting them involved in the lessons I teach them. I will instruct them with smart board activities and I will allow them to interact with it as well. I will take that extra step for my students. I will provide my students with instructional websites, like Dr. Strange has done for us. I also want my children to know how to read and write, effectively! I will assign them different reading comprehension assignments, have them write out what and how they felt about the reading, and then they will be able to type their responses once I have proofread them. This is just one example of how I plan to educate my students; I will incorporate more than one teaching and learning method for my students.

Don't Let Them Take the Pencils Home

Mr. Johnson kept a positive outlook in a general conversation he was having with another teacher. The teacher was more concerned with children learning from the structured learning environment; instead he encourages them playing different games and learning from them such as hangman. He believes they may learn something more valuable from their games than what we teach. He just has very open mind about children’s learning. This just teaches us that as we become educators to not focus so much on our students scoring high on test scores, but to encourage them to learn.