
Thoughts on teaching from a wannabe-teacher
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Standardized tests and the "failing" public education system

Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Social-skills help with academic learning
In my search for interesting articles to use for my letter to the editor assignment this semester, I came across an article titled “Study finds social-skills teaching boosts academics” on the Education Week website. This article is really interesting and in my opinion shows the importance of focusing not only on academics, but on these social and emotional skills as well. The children are not only benefiting by learning to cooperate more with their peers and are able to handle stress better (which prepares them just as much for real-life and the workforce as academics, in my humble opinion), but also improve their grades and standardized-test scores. I hope that this study will reach the school administrators and political figures out there who are trying to decrease or phase out the amount of time that is spent teaching children these skills. Focusing on math and science is not the only way of guiding our children to be contenders in the global job market and to help our nation continue to be front-runners in the global economy. We want our children to be well-rounded individuals, allowed to pursue their interests, not just those interests that administrators feel they should pursue. As one of my classmates said in a class last night, not all students are meant to be academic, or want to pursue careers as engineers or scientists. We should give them options in their learning and not make those decisions for them.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
First postings make me nervous...
My name is Jessica. I'm a grad student at George Mason University working on my Master's of Education in Curriculum and Instruction. This blog is actually an assignment for a course on "Integrating Technology in Elementary Classrooms" with a focus on literacy. On our blogs we are supposed to post our thoughts on education and the teaching profession, including our thoughts on public opinion of the school system and our response to these opinions. I am going to have to do a bit more research in order to complete this assignment but I do know that society constantly demands that teachers improve student performance on standardized tests, assuming that teachers aren't doing their jobs or that the school systems today are flawed in some major way. I am not about to say that there aren't bad teachers out there, I am sure there are plenty, but I feel that teachers get a lot of unfair treatment and blame for things that a lot of people don't fully understand. People who have never taught cannot even begin to understand how complicated the profession is and unfortunately form opinions based on their experiences as students. I will start to do more research and post my findings and opinions on this blog as I go along...should be interesting.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)