The Good Teacher: Part Three
The good teacher enters his or her classroom with an open
mind. Above all, an open mind towards
the students in that class, is imperative.
As a teacher of many years, I can attest that we are always
given files, also called Learning Profiles, of each student. We are supposed to read these and tailor
lessons around these profiles, or learning styles. In other words most of the kids have been
pigeon holed, some of them for years, into these styles.
I find it nearly impossible to look at young student and not
feel kind of cornered into emotions surrounding that child, stemming from these
reports. “Ooh-oo, gotta have written instructions for
this one, he can’t learn from spoken lessons.
Gotta really do a special one-on-one
with this other one – she is really shy and won’t interact otherwise.” And so on.
As the teacher I always feel such pressure and even, sometimes,
resentment towards a kid that has been identified as one who needs kid gloves.
And yet I have also often found these reports were full of
shit. I find the vast majority of kids
just need somebody to validate them as actual people.
Most of their lives they have had stuff
just thrown at them and it has been expected to stick. If it didn’t then some reason was invented as to why it didn’t, or
generally doesn’t, stick.
This is a practice that has become nearly doctrinal throughout all educational
institutions today. We keep testing and testing, hammering at the
poor kid’s id until we break it into
pieces that we, being the adult
educators, can understand – can quantify and label. Often many of those, who
have actually determined these learning
differences, rarely ever enter a real
classroom and observe the same students they have labeled.
An educational classroom is a dynamic entity. It almost seems to be a living, breathing organism. And each
different class is unique. There is the
teacher, who derives a satisfaction from teaching and interacting with young
minds anxious to learn (usually) and the students, who, each in turn, interact
with the teacher, each other and the class as a whole. This entity moves, it spins, it consumes
knowledge, it creates new thought, and sometimes it bogs down and needs a bit
of recharging. It can seem to rest, even
sleep and then awake and start going at it all all over again.
I admit there many children who do have somewhat specific input, as it were, channels that seem to work better than others. Hell, we all do – all our lives. Everybody is unique in just about every
way possible. The short person can’t
reach the highest shelf and so tends to ignore things that are way up high. The very tall person is generally banging his
or her head on door jams and so tends to be looking up a lot. Or, things like
that.
I am a visual spatial
learner. What I see, I tend to remember. And
that’s a lot of what it’s all about, isn’t it?
What you remember. What you can spit back on a test. ?? Is
that knowledge? Is that wisdom? Or is the whole objective to be able to do something? To be able to actually perform some function
that returns a value to your society and to your sense of a happy fulfilling life?
If the second part of this thinking is the objective we are seeking, then sticking some label on a kid
as soon as you can justify doing that, isn’t that rather
counter-productive. How can you truly know until enough educational
experience has settled into the child’s brain?
Maybe the year the child was labeled as a visual learner was the year that child had a teacher with really
strong accent or speech impediment, and the kid just couldn’t understand that
teacher.
I have been teaching for over twenty-five years and I have yet
to witness a Learning Specialist in
my classroom. So how, or why, should I
spend a great deal of time on reports that are going to close my mind to any
child and the potential that I might
discover? Is it not reasonable that I
remain open minded as I begin a new class, a new school year, as I will in just
a few weeks from now. And let my lesson
plans evolve as my own experience
has served me, then I believe I have a better chance of tendering some actual learning in that class.
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Dale Clarence Peterson © 2014
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