Education: Beyond Academics and Into Society

Introduction

Education has always been more than just math, science, English or history to me. Educating is about teaching and learning those academic subjects, but it is also about teaching what is means to be a good friend, son or daughter and just member of society and learning how to take these academic and social skills to new levels in a learner’s life. School is a place for everyone to learn, both teachers and students, about one another’s backgrounds and interests, but it is also a place to teach and learn how to become equipped for aspects of the changing world.

Teaching and Learning

Learning is more than memorizing and repeating. I believe learning is a unique and specific process that involves taking new concepts and understanding

Learning is not just about giving kids a way to solve their problems or making them explain what they have learned in their own way, but it starts with understanding the way students learn. In Steven Turner’s reading, he said “Because student learning is the one measure all teachers are held responsible to influence, before the can influence their students, teachers much understand the ways students learn.” (p. 9). In my previous example about teaching the boy subtraction, I had a very fixed view of his learning and I believed the only way I could tell if had influenced his learning in subtraction was to see if he could use his own words to explain it. However, kids are still developing their own language so it is not fair to measure their learning ability or my influence on the way they explain a new concept. Instead learning starts with identifying the way your student learns best and for my tutoring student maybe this wasn’t even the way he learns best, maybe he needs physical representations. In my placement this semester, one student came up to me with his completed math worksheet and I pointed to the subtraction problem on it and said, “I like the hard work you put on this, I was wondering how you got this answer?” and he brought me over to the number line in his classroom. He went on to explain how he uses the number line to count backwards and see what number he gets to and that is his answer. A couple weeks later, he was struggling with a difficult subtraction problem and asked me to help him. I wanted to explain it in the way I understood it with physical manipulations or by using that concept of buddies, but I realized he had a way he understands subtraction so I tried to draw on that. We must learn the ways our students understand concepts in order to make any kind of