Teaching Philosophy Statement
Ever since I was born and could comprehend, my parents hammered into my brain the need to excel. Not just to excel in general but to excel over everyone else. My parents are very competitive and believe the world is the same way. In their mind, it is them vs. everyone else in any and everything they do. I was encouraged to compete against my two older brothers to be the best in everything we did. This included sports such as soccer when we were younger, baseball, and most importantly, football. It also included academic areas such as grades and extracurricular activities such as student council. Whoever was doing the best at the time would be held up on a pedestal figuratively as a person for us to emulate. This upbringing instilled in me a need to get great grades, lift zealously to do better in those sports and be bigger than everyone else, and to also do excellent in sports. I got great grades all through grade school and high school and also was an all valley tackle in high school in football. I was one of the “smart” football players. After looking at the different characteristics of each philosophy, I realize that I have been raised as and become an essentialist. I believe essentialism to be the best teaching method to force the students to learn.
Essentialism puts an emphasis on academics. What is the purpose of school? Basically, the purpose for the teacher is to teach students information while the purpose for the students is to learn the information. That means the point of going to school is to learn academics. Score one for the essentialists. Essentialism also goes by the theory of promotion based on the mastery of the material gone over in class. How else could someone be promoted on to something harder or higher? By not mastering previous material? No. Academic subjects usually build on content in each field until the top is reached. Here, to excel, one must know and know well all the previous material to deal with the subject.
York, Geoffrey. 2007. “Text-messages: the new Chinese protest tool.” Globe and Mail, Friday, June 1: A13.
According to Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran, in his movie “Secrets of the Mind,” our vision system is divided into two parts, one with our eyes, and the other with our brain. He also says that there are two different pathways in which our brain uses to “see.” One of these pathways, he calls the evolutionary new pathway (the more sophisticated pathway) in which our eyes see, then the information is sent to the thalamus, and eventually entering the visual cortex of the brain. This pathway is the conscious part of seeing. The other pathway Dr. Ramachandran says is more prominent, as well as evolutionarily primitive. An iguana uses this system of seeing. In this second pathway, information enters through the eyes, and then is sent to the brain stem, which in turn relays the information to the higher center of the brain. Dr. Ramachandran says that this second system is used to orientate our eyes to look at things, especially movement. Dr. Ramachandran has looked at patients with what is known as blind-sight to form his hypothesis.
Figure 1.2 shows a simple schematic detailing the combination or retinal information and eye velocity estimates to generate a perceived motion direction. This diagram is analogous to figure 1.1, showing the integration of signals from a lower ‘detector’ level, at the eye movement and retinal velocity estimate level, and later at an integrator stage, after which the motions have been transformed into the perceived direction. This diagram also illustrates the focus of chapters 2, 3 and 4. Chapter 2 investigates the motion aftereffect (see adaptation section) which follows simultaneous retinal motion and repetitive smooth pur...
Everyday people in China are suffering from their government. From being wrongly accused to being executed for petty crimes. In a country where you cannot speak your opinions, talk poorly about government officials, speak about Chinese communist failures, or even browse the internet freely. China has kept its citizens in the void. One example is the great firewall of china, which sensors most social media and other sites. This essay will go into some individual stories of the Chinese government's unfair social injustices towards its people.
In our time of uncertainty one of the most stable institutions is the school system for children. Thus, being a teacher and providing the most stable atmosphere along with providing the children with an education must be handled delicately. I believe a mixture of essentialism, progressivism, perennialism, behaviorism, and social reconstrctonism is essential in achieving those goals.
Sajda P. & Finkle, L.H. (1995) Intermediate Visual Representations and the Construction of Surface Perception. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 7, 267-291.
After seeing the same images basically every day, such as the letters of the alphabet, the brain will automatically recognize those objects time and time again, and processing and understanding those images can be near instantaneous. However, should these images be altered in orientation, the brain must go through additional processing in order to differentiate that it is, in fact, the same object, but the time it takes to figure that out is much more than an instant. The idea of mental rotation speaks to the cerebral ability to imagine in one’s mind a particular object, oriented in a way that is unusual or not commonly seen. The brain can move (or imagine moving) objects spatially to surmise their proper orientation. A stimulus can be any image present in the environment that is altered in some way; mental rotation then occurs in order to to figure out what the altered object is. The first test of these correlations was administered in 1971 by Shepard and Metzler, and have informed the many studies related to this phenomenon since then.
As a “speculative man of high motives and refined sensibility”(Catherine C. Dominic) Brutus does have his confusion of motives. Act I, scene ii, is the first we see his weakness, “his concern with reputation and appearance, his subtle vanity and pride”(Gayle Green). Yet the main bases of Brutus’s bewilderment of motives takes place in Act II, scene I, with his famous soliloquy beginning with “It must be by his death”. This speech may be the turning point in which Brutus feels better about the assassination of his once called friend.
For instance, the William Yeats quote that was listed above, can also advocate an idea against essentialism. Essentials argue for the continual testing of students, as well as the continuous pouring of basic knowledge and skills into students (Quantz, 2015, page 79-80). Therefore, when the author negatively comments on educators who fill the pail, she is really referring to essentialist teachers just filling the brains of students with skills that they believe students will need in the future. Similarly, another anti-essentialist example in the text is when she reports “How horrified she would be by the thinking that reduces teaching to test-prep drill and professional practice to a numerical score” (Strauss, 2012, Paragraph 4). Essentialists, as briefly mentioned, focus on testing as a means to evaluate students, as well as believe that teachers are at the center of the classroom (Quantz 2012, pages 79-80). Therefore, by stating that teaching in programs like RGSE reduce teaching to drills and test scores, she is implying that teaching has become impersonal and more like the military; constantly running the same impersonal drills in order to produce the results you want. This point expands on the major criticism of Strauss’s piece that the RGSE program, which follows the instruction of charter schools, is not a helpful learning environment and it
The philosophy of essentialism is important to me, although I feel students can still relate to school in a positive way. Students can learn the core subjects—reading, writ...
All six of the major educational philosophies Perennialism, Progressivism, Essentialism, Existentialism, Social Reconstruction, and Behaviorism are in my opinion feasible in the classroom. However, I have chosen Essentialism as the primary philosophy I would like to employ in my classroom for several reasons. Although I think all six would result in learning, which is the primary purpose of education, I think that Essentialism is superior to the other five for my classroom. I feel this way because it embraces the purpose or original goal of public education, it allows lessons to be gauged to all different learning styles, and finally because essentialism employs methods of teaching and discipline that I believe work exceptionally well with my content specialization.
Essentialism is Essentialism refers to the "traditional" or "Back to the Basics" approach to education.
Essentialism is defined by Webster as an educational theory that ideas and skills basic to a culture should be taught to all alike by time-tested methods. It has been present since the beginning of schooling. As time and culture progress, the academic standards for education increase and become more specific. It is clear that the focus in the vast majority of schools is to
There are four philosophies of education. They consists of perennialism, progressivism, social Reconstructionism, and essentialism. Each philosophy of education plays a role in American education. Today essentialism plays one of the biggest roles in American education. Essentialism tries to give all students the most basic academic knowledge, skills, and character development. I too believe in the essentialism philosophy of education. I agree with this philosophy because I believe that intellectual self-discipline should be encouraged within the classroom, all students have the ability to learn regardless of their needs, and teachers should concentrate on teaching basic skills. All of these beliefs falls under the essentialism philosophy
My philosophy of education is a combination of essentialism and progressivism . I feel that knowledge can be learned from a textbook, but I also want my students to use other means of knowledge. I fell in certain times, I should be the center of the classroom and other times, the students should be the center. Education is about the students and I am there to guide them through their journey. I think it's important to let children learn by exploring. By doing this, they choose what information is important and should be retained. When it comes to learning, students should always be in the center. The teachers are only there to mentor and improve upon a child's skills. In my mind progressivism with a mix of essentialism is the best philosophy for me to follow.