LIFE!
My metaphor for my teaching is............Life!!!
100 years ago John Dewey looked at the average American classroom and saw rows of children, "sitting quietly and obediently in their seats, passively receiving information from their teachers and committing random facts to memory. Every classroom and every teacher would be doing the same thing at the same time."*
This is exactly how Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein were taught 30 and 60 years earlier, and both hated it!
Fortunately, Edison's mom pulled Tom out of school and little Al learned to teach himself.
He also realized, as does Sir Ken Robinson today, that if the teacher learned what most interested his students, and created a learning environment based on his students' unique interests, learning could flourish and students could be more likely to be successful in real-life.
This didn't mean a real lower-level thinking life of a factory worker or fast-food server by the way.
brainyquote
*http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/pioneers-our-field-john-dewey-father-pragmatism
I wish all teachers could read this. I was on Twitter the other day and an author mentioned that a teacher cancelled her Skype visit with the kids because she had too much test prep to do. So sad.
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LisaTeachR'sClassroom
Yes that it is! We can't cancel meaningful teachable moments, especially for meaningless commitment of teach-to-the-test facts to memory.
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