Blog Post 10

"Do You Teach or Do You Educate?"

This video starts with a definition of "to teach", and all of the definitions, except for number four ("cause someone to learn or understand something"), seem to suggest giving students information as opposed to having them learn it themselves - ie, burp-back education. Number five even seems to suggest forcing students into learning, something we know we cannot do.

The video then moves to the definition of "to educate" - many words are mentioned, including "enlighten", "illuminate", and "inspire". An educator is defined as "one who gives intellectual, moral, and social instruction". They are also classified as guides: mentors, instructors, advisors. It then ends with multiple quotes about the way we should educate from philosophical minds.

We must be educators, not teachers. We cannot simply give students information and/or force them to learn; we have to show them the way to obtain and use information to help them become functional outside the classroom.

"Don't Let Them Take Pencils Home"

This was a very interesting post for me to read. For one, Mr. Spencer was the source of four weeks of C4T assignments for me, so it was a joy to get to read him again. The message of his post? We seem to be missing the forest for the trees.

Far to often, we seem to try and pinpoint little, insignificant causes of problems rather than finding solutions. Thus we end up with often idiotic "fixes", such as this one - solutions that have absolutely no correlation to the problem at hand. It's almost a blame game in this example - what can we blame for our schools' terrible test scores? I know! The pencils!

So what does this say to me? Don't be stupid as a teacher. Don't allow yourself to make excuses and misassign blame on little things instead of your own incompetence and others' incompetence. Am I being harsh? Probably so, but I think sometimes we need a good dose of harsh to help us be better educators and people.