Everything about Education & Teens
Archive for December, 2009
What Makes a Good Education Instructor?
Dec 23rd
A recent discussion with friends developed about the education our children are receiving and what makes a good education instructor. Our discussion raised questions such as why a person became an educational instructor in the first place and what are some important teaching traits. Should it all be just about following a course or is there more?
To quote Albert Einstein; “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” We have all joked about this as adults. What are we using today that we learned in school? Think about the life skills such as the ability to make the correct decision in stressful situations and thinking for oneself rather than being led.
A good eduction instructor prepares students for the world awaiting them after they leave school so they can be the absolutely best they can be and make a difference in the world with every person they touch. It needs to be more than teaching just for an exam, but teaching the students for the rest of their life.
Active Learning – Stimulating the Young Mind
Dec 23rd
Learning activities in the classroom are an important part of teaching. Students thrive on a deviation from the typical lecture-assignment format often seen in classrooms. Classroom activities get kids moving and stimulate their minds. Activities that are taken outdoors can provide exercise and even teach about environmentalism and biology. Active indoor activities can help students burn off energy on rainy or snowy days.
Even with all the benefits of learning activities, it is still common to see classrooms that rarely deviate from the standard. This is because classroom activities take planning and preparation, along with materials. Many teachers find putting them together to be tedious and time consuming, but with a little notice, activities really can be put together without too much work.
The first step to having fun learning activities is to plan ahead. After doing the activity the first time, it will get easier and easier. Decide which subject the activity will teach. Sometimes multiple subjects can be tied together with the right project (history and reading or math and art.) Make sure the lesson is within your school’s curriculum and then refresh yourself on the subject by looking through the teacher edition of the text book.
Education, Meaning, Aim and Function
Dec 22nd
The process of defining the meaning of Education is to problematize its lexicology and re-conceptualize it. An example is illustrated from real day-life. A multinational company involved in the making of advanced pharmaceutical products decides to get rid of its wastes in a cheaper manner rather then waste-treat them. They dump the wastes around the coast of a poorer African continent based on the company’s policy of maximum profits. Are the board of directors in the company educated? They are, one can assume for rhetorical comfort. An illiterate, native-tribe living in the rainforest jungles of Papua New Guinea doesn’t know the meaning of Environmental jargon: ‘Reduce, Recycle & Reuse’; yet, they conserve and sustain the environment, based on the level of skills known to them. Are the people of the rainforest uneducated just because they are illiterate?
The problems connected with narrowness of meaning called Education emerge within the contextuality of the above mentioned examples, and the conceptual difficulties involved in attempting to centre meaning upon Education is by all means complicated. So the meaning of education has to emerge from this narrowness to the broadness of meaning. In its broadness of meaning Education is the process of ‘stimulating’ the ‘person’ with Experiences, Language and Ideology, beginning from the time of birth and continuing till the time of death. This meaning of Education would give rise to the Aim, as disseminating formally, non-formally, culturally, nationally, scientifically and ritually-skills, literacy, knowledge, norm and values, as pedagogies of the institutions giving rise to the aim. This aim would be directly related to the perpetuation of that Society as an ideological structure. Aim would again determine the Function of Education The function of Education would be thus related to how meaning and aims are synchronized into processes called experience of application. The thesis statement of this paper is developed on three levels-one, the meaning of education as the stimulation of person a with language, experiences and ideology-two, aim of education being dissemination and perpetuation, and three, function, as synchronized processing.
The development of the Meaning of Education as a stimulation of a person from birth to death with language, experiences and ideology makes the person, a Being of the process as an Ontology. This process starts right from birth as affective language, for example, a mother’s cooing, to a process where the person becomes a cognitive structure, as I-the speaking subject or ego-subject. Here, the individual undergoes the norms, traditions of the society’s culture and learns to adapt and appropriate the symbolic codes of the society. Along with this process, the individual also learns to formalize his or her adaptation and appropriation to a literacy process i.e. developing skills and competencies. Thus we find that the Meaning of Education to be multi-leveled as well as multiple -oriented, through both formalist and non-formalist institutions of society. The formalist institutions which procreate the Meaning of Education are the Schools, the Government, Law and Order etc. Other formalist institutions like family, religion and native-traditions can work both openly as well as silently to orient an individual to the meaning of experience as the educated. For example a mother’s oral transmission of a folk song to the daughter is silent whereas a marriage function is a more open aspect as the performance of a culture’s pedagogy. Thus language and experiences generate the codes for that society to experience the Meaning of Education, making possible for ideologies to exist.