Blog Post #10

I want to start off by saying that I became an educator to educate, inspire, innovate, and much more than just teach. This video, Do You Teach or Do You Educate? has very few words, but they are truly inspiring as a future educator. When I become an educator here in the near future, I want to give my students more than they really would appreciate. What I mean by that is that I want to educate my students about things like morals and values, learning experiences they never thought could be possible. I also want to make every lesson intriguing to them and fun, that is why I plan to use a SMARTboard as much as possible and have arts and crafts projects. I am currently taking ARS 101-105 and it is not a requirement for my major. I took this class so I can be better at art and educate my students by giving them projects and being creative! I want my classroom to be a fun environment for them, but first and for most an educational environment where they can learn and be creative.

I truly want my students to grasp the concepts and if I give them creative projects to do or allow them to play SMARTboard games in any subject, they will be more likely to KNOW the material and not just memorize it. I was in Elementary before, we all have and we all know that doing something artsy and creative was more fun and easier to comprehend than reading text out of a book or just having it read to you. Act out the characters, allow your students to create radio stations and podcasts about a book. These lessons will take just as much time as any other lesson. The only difference is that students are being EDUCATED and not TAUGHT something. This video really did get me thinking about how I am going to create my lesson plans and how I am going to fulfill my duties as an educator. I truly feel more confident now about what I plan to do.

Don't Let Them Take Pencils Home

I like Tom Johnson's blog because he is not hypocritical or misjudging about the argument. Gertrude read one research article on pencils and automatically assumed that students taking pencils home will lower test scores. How? I agree with Tom Johnson, even if they play hangman with the pencil and piece of paper, they are learning something and with this example, they could be learning vocabulary word because they have to think about what the word is and spell it out before you hang the stick figure. I found this post to be somewhat amusing and funny because he is sarcastic about why Gertrude would not want students to take pencils home like stabbing themselves in the scrotum or damage of property. He sets his argument up that way and creates a good one too!

His argument is that pencils have a bad reputation that they are just used for entertainment for students and not to do work. He continues to argue that even if students are using then to "entertain" like playing hangman, they are learning something in some kind of way. Also, he doesn't hold his students accountable for the pencils and paper, he tries to keep them on interesting projects. I believe his main point to his argument is that students used pencils to take that "drill-and-kill" bubble test to get the research and to take bubble tests in school too. Why can't students take pencils home to do work? It's not like the teacher is taking the test and they only learn in the classroom. Students learn at home as well as in the classroom so why retain their learning environment to just the classroom?