Sunday, April 8, 2012

Blog Assignment #10

Do You Teach or Do You Educate?

Teaching is a very rewarding gift, but from this video, I’ve realized that educating is even bigger. In Do You Teach or Do You Educate?, a video created by FWYL Foothill College (2006), there are different definitions for teaching someone and educating someone. With teaching, the teacher explains, shows, encourages, and they give information. With educating, the educators inspire, enlighten, and empower. Educators are known as a trusted and experienced mentor. Basically anyone can be a teacher, but it takes that special someone to educate.


When watching this video, I interpreted it as teachers do the bare minimum for students to pass and learn what they need to so they can move on. An educator will go the extra mile for their students. They will not only teach what needs to be taught, but they also reach out as a mentor that students can learn from. When I get my degree, I plan to be an educator because I want my students to want to learn, yet be inspired by me and my journey to success. I know I will be able to give my all to my students. But I know I have to get used to putting in the extra time and wanting the best for my students. If you want to be a successful educator, you must educate yourself first. I'm going to try to educate myself to the best of my ability so my students can learn from the best.

Don’t Let them Take the Pencils Home!

Wow, what a post! A teacher trying to be an educator and improve the his students while an academic specialist shuts the whole idea down. In Don't Let them Take Pencils Home!, a teacher is told not to to allow his students to bring their pencils home because it results in low test scores. The teacher tried to defend his students by telling the academic that he doesn’t agree with the research and believing that they can change the paradigm. When the academic specialist asks how, the teacher proceeds by telling her about the parent pencil program which gives the students and their parents a chance to do projects with pencils and not just think they are a toy. But then the academic specialist shuts him down by saying the students are going to be playing hangman and tells him not to blame her when his test scores are low.


The first thing that really stood out to me about this post was the negativity from the academic specialist! I don’t like how the specialist doubted the students without even giving the idea of the program a chance. I believe anyone working with students in a school should always have hope in them. Anothing thing about this post was grasping the idea that this specialist was so serious about the students not being able to take pencils home. I would have never thought that it would affect the score of a test but they did a whole study on it, so it may be true. I believe Mr. Johnson stood his ground with his argument of don’t believe everything you hear. He tried to give his students the benefit of the doubt by creating a program for them to explore the use of a pencil. He knew his students’ parents were not exposed to pencils on a daily basis and wanted to expose everyone that is involved with the student to use a pencil for learning. It never said if it worked or not but I hope he was able to pull through with his ideas.

3 comments:

  1. Chanel,
    You did a really great job on this post. You express and explain yourself really well. I did see just a few simple errors throughout this blog post, but they are very minor and can be fixed with just simply proof reading.
    The first error I found while reading your post is, "A teacher trying to be an educator and improve THE his students while an academic specialists shuts down the whole idea." You should remove the word the that I bolded.
    The second error I found is right after the link you added "Don't' Let them Take Pencils Home", you wrote the word to twice so you should remove one.
    And the last error I found was in your ending paragraph. You were explaining how you felt about this post and you wrote Anothing, which isn't a word, to start a sentence but I think you meant to write Another thing.
    Like I said, these were just simple fixable errors.
    Good luck with the remainder of the semester and your future as an educator! Keep up great blogging!!

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  3. I am so glad to see that you want to be an educator rather than just a run-of-the-mill teacher. It is wonderful to hear that you want to be an agent of change in your school.
    However, you might want to pay closer attention to the Don't Let Them Take Pencils Home post. The point of the article was not about literal pencils. It is in no sense a literal piece of writing. Rather, it is a metaphor. I wish I could tell you what this metaphor is, but I would like you to re-read the post and re-evaluate your thoughts. As a result of the re-evaluation, you may understand the actual point that the author is trying to make. Also, watch out for those small, careless errors. Once accumulated, they detract a lot of value from any content that you present. All it takes is one proof-read and your golden!

    Thanks,

    Rebekah Lloyd

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