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| I should just take a page out of Garfield's book (pun intended). |
How have you been? The weather is starting to get a bit brisk, don't you think? How about those Maple Leafs? Enough of the idle chit chat! We have important things to discuss and you should not be distracting me at such an important time! Shame on you blog friends. Shame on you. I don't even like the Leafs. Who am I kidding I don't even like hockey... or any physical activity now that I think about it... But there are many things to be discussed, one of which is not my laziness, so lets get this shindig started.
I may have mentioned earlier that my main teachable is mathematics, and if I didn't I'm telling you now. Now I could spend the majority of this post trying to convince you that math isn't scary and that its actually a very interesting subject, but that would take the larger portion of my lifetime and I'm sure you have better things to do. The point I am trying to make here is that math is a very theoretical subject, and this is why it often comes off as dry. People care much less about a subject if they don't understand how it applies to their life, which is logical. Why should I memorize all these numbers if all I'm going to get out of it is... A mark... Which is just another number... Woohoo (insert sarcasm here). My objective as an educator is to make my subject and course material engaging, so yes, I am going to spend the larger portion of my lifetime trying to make math interesting. Our logic process thus far dictates that a good place to start is to show students that math is applicable. How to we do this? More projects, more collaboration! You guys probably thing that I am obsessed with collaboration since I bring it up so often. Well that's because collaboration is debatably the best thing that has happened to man kind since the invention of the wheel. Don't quote me on that. Point is that collaboration is in my opinion one of the most useful tools in education, and that is not something you realize until you see it first hand. I am confident that I would not be in university right now if I did not have have my classmates to collaborate with, and I know many people which feel the same way. By introducing your students to projects which require them to research a real world application, or even have your students work in a real world setting, they are able to fully explore and understand a lesson. Further use of this design is to have students lead their own learning, and come up with their own project ideas instead of the educator, this way they become emotionally invested in their task. To summarize, education would be much more effective if students were engaged in real-world based projects. Now if only a design that revolved around this idea existed... Oh wait! It does. Its called Inquiry-Based Learning. It's a thing. Look it up.
As mentioned earlier, my life these past two weeks have consisted of homework, food, and sleep (the last one is optional). Needless to say, I have had more than enough time to reflect on my life decisions. The same life decisions that have now led me to this point of time where I am sitting on the sixth floor of the library in my socks and pajamas, for 9 hours. Strange how one week the school life is carefree and then the next the only thing keeping you awake are those 3 coffees you chugged half hour ago. I think we all have a creeping suspicion that there exists an international league of professors that meet bi-weekly to discuss how many midterms they can place on a single day before a student ends up in the mental hospital.
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| This is how horror movies originate. With kids who can't do algebra. |
All of this rambling eventually leads to a valid point, just bear with me here. So amongst my self pity and reflection I came to the conclusion that the majority of the information I am learning is utterly useless to me. Kind of sad that it took me four years to realize this actually. How is understanding the derivation of energy from a Lagrangian equation going to help me teach high schoolers how to factor? I don't want you to pull a muscle trying to find an answer, so let me give you a hint: it doesn't. But that doesn't mean that all this schooling I am going through is useless. You better put on your hardhat because I'm about to drop some knowledge on your head. Our university education is actually teaching us some very useful skills and they are doing it through the hidden curriculum. Boom, big key word over here. I'm just connecting all the dots. If there is one thing that my education is teaching me by shoving information down my throat and testing me in a confined time frame, its not formulas. It's resilience, it's time management, it's methods of stress relief and a whole slue of other phrases I could spout off all day. In short, I came across an epiphany of sorts which states that even though I may not appreciate what I am learning in school, I can appreciate the fact that it is shaping me into a character who can effectively manage and teach a classroom one day.
This is where my ramble cuts off. I would like to formally thank you for hearing out my thought process and reading my post. And if you didn't read my post but just kinda skimmed, you're really missing out. So long blog friends. Don't ever change.
