I chose to address homeschooling in today's blog post.
Just to clear things up, homeschooling (by definition) is the education of children at home, typically by parents but sometimes by tutors, rather than in other formal settings of public or private school. There is much debate as to whether or not homeschooling is indeed beneficial in more respects than public or private school, with homeschooling parents driving the support for homeschooling and the National Education Association etc. driving the criticism. So let's chat about homeschooling...
1. I will look at what prompts parents to homeschool their children. In this report, we can see that the highest reasons for homeschooling is the parent's belief in instructing their child better or for religious and moral reasons. This accommodates 87.3% of households, and frankly, I find this reason to be absolutely ridiculous.
I can understand that parenting is a tough world that I have no experience in, but I'm sure that holding your child back from the social and ethnic diversity of public and private school is detrimental to their character, not their education. In my mind, peer-to-peer social skills is as important as academic skills. Interacting in a classroom is what makes public school and private school so crucial to our general public. Homeschooling tends to present information in a one-sided, filtered way through parents, and trying to maintain a child's religion by shunning them from public school is among the most overprotective things I can think of.
2. I will look at a comparison of standardized test scores between homeschooled children and public school children. However, we can almost immediately strike this off the record because hoomeschooled children are not subject to the same testing requirements as per the No Child Left Behind Act. In addition, scores are compared between volunteer homeschoolers and mandatory public schoolers. It also should be noted that overall, homeschooled students scored better on the national ACT, yet their math scores were slightly under the national average.
Just with these few points can I see that homeschooling is not worth risking a child's much needed interaction with peers. We may see videos of homeschooled child prodigies, yet this does not automatically determine which schooling system is better. Should this issue be ignored and politicians such as Ron Paul continue to support the issue, we may see a huge flux of students switching to homeschooling and avoiding the social interaction that characterizes public schooling. Ultimately, parents are the stakeholders here, and making the wrong decision will heavily influence the outcome of this nation. With megacountries like China and North Korea beating us in education, we cannot afford to lag behind because of some moral agenda against public schooling.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Monday, February 20, 2012
Twitter: Pros and Cons
Let me just start by saying that I personally use Twitter, and my username is @hayden_julius if anyone wishes to follow me.
Twitter is one of those social networking sites that is just so mindblowingly simple that it can be used in so many different ways. Essentially, Twitter was created as a way to keep tabs on people by receiving their 140-characters-or-less "tweets", whether or not online or mobile. For me, Twitter does just that: it allows me to send out quick thoughts or jokes or something interesting for others to read. I like to think of myself as a conduit of entertainment as opposed to another user: I share the most incredible puns and jokes ya 'dun ever seen, and I think I've counted nine retweets in one day. I guess I'm just that cool.
Likewise, I don't send out tweets on pointless things. I don't talk about my life of adequate normalcy because I don't like getting tweets of other people's simple existence. I just don't care enough to go through the effort of opening my phone to hear about things that aren't relevant. That being said, I do like to feel out where my followers and people I follow are doing. I like hearing gossip or about events I couldn't go to; I like hearing all the interesting things people have to say without going through the social convention of conversation. That doesn't mean Twitter replaces the importance of real-life conversation, but I enjoy it for the breadth of wisdom each of these tweets might have.
Another desperately important aspect of Twitter's success is the access users have to celebrities they choose to follow. For instance, I follow Conan O'Brien, Steve Martin, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Respectively, those people are a talk show host, an actor/bluegrass extraordinaire, and an astrophysicist. I follow them because I think their tweets are for my own entertainment and especially Dr. Tyson, whose tweets (when not cheap astro-poetry) contain really cool information about the biggest topics in science today.
Educationally, Twitter has a wide range of uses in the classroom; however, I don't see myself using it, purely because I already have too much fun with its social aspects. I don't wanna hear about my followers crunk parties because it's not professional for a teacher to have social ties with students. Perhaps programs like Celly and blogspot would be more appropriate to have the extra line of communication to my students, as opposed to this Twitter medium where I let loose and go crazy.
In summary, Twitter is bomb-diggity, but I cannot bring myself to integrate it into a classroom. And, I will leave this post with a joke I tweeted that got retweeted four times:
"Why don't we take ALL the leftover crumbs from Nature Valley granola bars and end world hunger?"
Twitter is one of those social networking sites that is just so mindblowingly simple that it can be used in so many different ways. Essentially, Twitter was created as a way to keep tabs on people by receiving their 140-characters-or-less "tweets", whether or not online or mobile. For me, Twitter does just that: it allows me to send out quick thoughts or jokes or something interesting for others to read. I like to think of myself as a conduit of entertainment as opposed to another user: I share the most incredible puns and jokes ya 'dun ever seen, and I think I've counted nine retweets in one day. I guess I'm just that cool.
Likewise, I don't send out tweets on pointless things. I don't talk about my life of adequate normalcy because I don't like getting tweets of other people's simple existence. I just don't care enough to go through the effort of opening my phone to hear about things that aren't relevant. That being said, I do like to feel out where my followers and people I follow are doing. I like hearing gossip or about events I couldn't go to; I like hearing all the interesting things people have to say without going through the social convention of conversation. That doesn't mean Twitter replaces the importance of real-life conversation, but I enjoy it for the breadth of wisdom each of these tweets might have.
Another desperately important aspect of Twitter's success is the access users have to celebrities they choose to follow. For instance, I follow Conan O'Brien, Steve Martin, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Respectively, those people are a talk show host, an actor/bluegrass extraordinaire, and an astrophysicist. I follow them because I think their tweets are for my own entertainment and especially Dr. Tyson, whose tweets (when not cheap astro-poetry) contain really cool information about the biggest topics in science today.
Educationally, Twitter has a wide range of uses in the classroom; however, I don't see myself using it, purely because I already have too much fun with its social aspects. I don't wanna hear about my followers crunk parties because it's not professional for a teacher to have social ties with students. Perhaps programs like Celly and blogspot would be more appropriate to have the extra line of communication to my students, as opposed to this Twitter medium where I let loose and go crazy.
In summary, Twitter is bomb-diggity, but I cannot bring myself to integrate it into a classroom. And, I will leave this post with a joke I tweeted that got retweeted four times:
"Why don't we take ALL the leftover crumbs from Nature Valley granola bars and end world hunger?"
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Reflecting on the PowerPoint Project
Last week, we were assigned a PowerPoint project: a project aimed to go in-depth with PowerPoint and make a presentation for a fictitious lesson that is relevant to our future career. As one of the few Science Education majors, I chose my presentation to be on the Strong Nuclear Force, something relatively easy but still fascinating, at least to me.
Looking back on the creation of the project, I realized exactly how much time was needed for constructing lesson plans and presentations alike. Over the course of a week, I spent six hours on the presentation: setting up slide transitions, embedding videos, and finding the right sources to allow me to calculate the diameter of a Uranium-235 nucleus. Cool, right?
But sometimes I lay awake at night and formulate my teaching philosophy. I tend to shy away from PowerPoints because students would just focus on scribbling down the ideas instead of critically thinking about them, even ideas they had a complete understanding in. I see myself as a teacher who can deliver a lesson without much technological aid and be flexible enough to answer student questions as they occur, as opposed to rigidly following and reusing PowerPoints. This was my initial reaction.
However, this project showed some of the usefulness of having visual aids embedded in, especially images and videos which would be time consuming and cumbersome to work with mid-lesson. Thus, I can see the potential for PowerPoint for my personal style of teaching. I can't say that I will make PowerPoints as in-depth and complete as someone who religiously uses them, but PowerPoints are a convenient way for me as a science teacher to display images and videos to give those visual learners some leeway.
Perhaps I will be off on a chalkboard explaining all the forces acting on objects while a PowerPoint has an interactive equation slide and corresponding visuals. This is so crazy, it just might work.
Looking back on the creation of the project, I realized exactly how much time was needed for constructing lesson plans and presentations alike. Over the course of a week, I spent six hours on the presentation: setting up slide transitions, embedding videos, and finding the right sources to allow me to calculate the diameter of a Uranium-235 nucleus. Cool, right?
But sometimes I lay awake at night and formulate my teaching philosophy. I tend to shy away from PowerPoints because students would just focus on scribbling down the ideas instead of critically thinking about them, even ideas they had a complete understanding in. I see myself as a teacher who can deliver a lesson without much technological aid and be flexible enough to answer student questions as they occur, as opposed to rigidly following and reusing PowerPoints. This was my initial reaction.
However, this project showed some of the usefulness of having visual aids embedded in, especially images and videos which would be time consuming and cumbersome to work with mid-lesson. Thus, I can see the potential for PowerPoint for my personal style of teaching. I can't say that I will make PowerPoints as in-depth and complete as someone who religiously uses them, but PowerPoints are a convenient way for me as a science teacher to display images and videos to give those visual learners some leeway.
Perhaps I will be off on a chalkboard explaining all the forces acting on objects while a PowerPoint has an interactive equation slide and corresponding visuals. This is so crazy, it just might work.
Monday, February 6, 2012
Blog Response -- Chapter 1 "Self-Directed Learning"
Regarding Chapter 1 in Personal Learning Networks, Will Richardson and Rob Mancabelli strike a startling conclusion on the future of technology of the classroom. With words like "transform" and "revolution", their desperate call for connectivity is quite apparent. Their collaborative views on the future of education are indeed revolutionary, but I tend to disagree with them on many issues. This response is a critical view of their claims and why their utopian view of education is not going to be as easy as it looks.
Richardson and Mancabelli take the effort to mention the importance of self-directed learning -- perhaps the biggest beef I have with Chapter 1 and the focus of this blog response. "[Self-directed learning] is a big departure, and it's one that we have to understand for ourselves if we are to make sense of what roles schools and classrooms are going to play in this much more self-directed learning world" (22). The text suggests that with a world of knowledge at one's fingertips, students are much more apt to learn when they take charge of their education and learn on their own. This passage (to me) undermines the importance of teachers and schools and begs the question of why we even bother. Richardson and Mancabelli later say that, "as our students come to expect these customized, highly personalized learning interactions online more and more, our system's inability to provide the same type of experience in the classroom will no doubt challenge the relevance of school in their eyes." The good intentions of allowing students to learn by interest area may be supported by research, but how many high-school students could you trust to self-learn Calculus, Physics, Chemistry, Government, English, and others? Can self-learning and self-guidance to learning pass proficiency tests and national standards?
Maybe self-learning shouldn't be shunned right away. In a study conducted by the Institute of Medicine in Toronto, medical students were placed into two groups in order to learn wound closure skills. One group was given an instructional video to learn from and one had the presence of an instructor who only showed specific portions of the video. The study found that self-directed students retained better wound closure skills than the instructor group.
Although the study was carefully conducted and reported, the self-learning method in this case was for technical work: wound closure. Perhaps self-learning is most beneficial in those technical tasks, whereas guided and instructional learning is best for new information. This has many applications, especially in my Physics focus, where I could teach all I know about gravity and motion, but once the students get hands-on experimentation and self-teach themselves, their understanding is reinforced. Had Richardson and Mancabelli discuss this concept over completely undermining the role of teachers, I would have been ten times more supportive of this argument. I want to make a difference in the community with what I teach and not become a proctor of online media to do the job I'm being trained to do.
In my opinion, self-learning has an enormous risk for students. Although they may learn things better when their area of interest is what I'm teaching, their path through the subject may stray very far from the standards that I would teach. I would encourage all the students to use the Internet for learning capabilities, but I would also stress that just because you read the Wikipedia article on black holes does not make you the leading expert in black holes and how it fits into a nation's criteria. Incorporating elements of self-learning and guided learning is where I see myself teaching. I cannot embrace the technology which aims to make me less involved.
Richardson and Mancabelli take the effort to mention the importance of self-directed learning -- perhaps the biggest beef I have with Chapter 1 and the focus of this blog response. "[Self-directed learning] is a big departure, and it's one that we have to understand for ourselves if we are to make sense of what roles schools and classrooms are going to play in this much more self-directed learning world" (22). The text suggests that with a world of knowledge at one's fingertips, students are much more apt to learn when they take charge of their education and learn on their own. This passage (to me) undermines the importance of teachers and schools and begs the question of why we even bother. Richardson and Mancabelli later say that, "as our students come to expect these customized, highly personalized learning interactions online more and more, our system's inability to provide the same type of experience in the classroom will no doubt challenge the relevance of school in their eyes." The good intentions of allowing students to learn by interest area may be supported by research, but how many high-school students could you trust to self-learn Calculus, Physics, Chemistry, Government, English, and others? Can self-learning and self-guidance to learning pass proficiency tests and national standards?
Maybe self-learning shouldn't be shunned right away. In a study conducted by the Institute of Medicine in Toronto, medical students were placed into two groups in order to learn wound closure skills. One group was given an instructional video to learn from and one had the presence of an instructor who only showed specific portions of the video. The study found that self-directed students retained better wound closure skills than the instructor group.
Although the study was carefully conducted and reported, the self-learning method in this case was for technical work: wound closure. Perhaps self-learning is most beneficial in those technical tasks, whereas guided and instructional learning is best for new information. This has many applications, especially in my Physics focus, where I could teach all I know about gravity and motion, but once the students get hands-on experimentation and self-teach themselves, their understanding is reinforced. Had Richardson and Mancabelli discuss this concept over completely undermining the role of teachers, I would have been ten times more supportive of this argument. I want to make a difference in the community with what I teach and not become a proctor of online media to do the job I'm being trained to do.
In my opinion, self-learning has an enormous risk for students. Although they may learn things better when their area of interest is what I'm teaching, their path through the subject may stray very far from the standards that I would teach. I would encourage all the students to use the Internet for learning capabilities, but I would also stress that just because you read the Wikipedia article on black holes does not make you the leading expert in black holes and how it fits into a nation's criteria. Incorporating elements of self-learning and guided learning is where I see myself teaching. I cannot embrace the technology which aims to make me less involved.
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