Blog Post 10

Do You Teach or Do You Educate?

This video goes over the differences of teaching and educating. It may be easier to teach someone how to do something, but it is not beneficial for the student to be taught instead of educated. What exactly are the benefits of of teaching? For the teacher it is the following: it is simply easier to do. Do we want to teach our children to be robots and to only think in the way that we program them to? Or would we rather have out children push for knowledge and question why something is? I want to be a mentor for my students by being someone that they look up to. Yes, I want to challenge them. I want to make them work hard. I know kids sometimes want to take the easy way out but I want to make sure that they learn when they are in my class.

As a future educator, I will need to remember not to think that my way is the only right way to do something. I will need to realize that students can come to the same conclusion by following different steps. I will try to show my students how to do something in various ways, so they can pick which method works the best for them. The students get a say in how they want to learn when they are being educated. I need to be open-minded and not expect a student to go about things in the way that I present for them. Students are unique, and I should not punish or scold them if they provide me with a unique answer.

Tom Johnson: Dont Let Them Take the Pencils Home!

This post may look like it is only about pencils, but it is about so much more than a simple writing tool. This post covers the importance of focusing on a problem and creating the proper solution to eliminate that problem. Tom Johnson presents his argument by telling a story. In this post, there is a woman named Gertrude who wants to ban the use of pencils. She tries to back up her reasoning with a study that does not clearly support her argument. Tom realizes that the study should not be applied to this situation. Tom Johnson is able to point out the flaws of her reasoning and provide a much more sound solution to the problem at hand. Tom creates a solution that will fix the actual problem at hand, instead of trying to eradicate the use of pencils with no proper reasoning, as Gertrude tries to do.

I wanted to be well-versed in what the Pencil Initiative actually was, so I did a bit more research on the blog site. Over in the navigation bar, there is a link called Conflict which describes the goals and struggles of Pencil Integration. Tom Johnson's Pencil Integration focuses on finding the perfect balance in the classroom. Classroom structures are going through a serious reformation to try and create an environment and method that is the most beneficial to educate our students. When do we use technology and when should we rely on the old teaching tools such as pencil and paper? How much technology is too much technology? Technology should be used in the classroom, but to what extent?