Blog Post #10

Do you Teach or Do you Educate?

My first reaction to this video was "WHAT KIND OF MUSIC AM I LISTENING TO?!" but when I began reading the message within, I began to see what the video was about. There is a great difference between being an educator and being a teacher.

Being an teacher basically means you are standing in front of a group of about 20-30 students, depending on what level of education you are teaching, and feeding them information that is stems from a book. Teaching is what most "educators" do and really do not realize how they are hurting the students in their classrooms. Students should be able to come into the classroom and be interact with their teachers, not come in and have to listen to someone drag on a lecture for 50 minutes to an hour. I know, personally, that I absolutely hate going to one of my night classes and have to sit there and listen to this woman talk until 8:30 at night! It drives me crazy!

Being an educator is more focused around what the student wants as well as needs to know. Educators find ways to make the material being studied worth the student's time and money. As I have said before, EDM310 was a brand new concept to me before I came into the realm of education. I knew that there was a different way to educate a student with boring them to death or "homeworking" them to death. I know what I want to be and what I am going to be. I am going to be an EDUCATOR!

My classroom is going to include the SMARTBOARD technology. My students will be required to have a "G-MAIL" address so that when projects are assigned and group assignments are present, they can have the technology needed to complete assignments as well as ways to collaborate with one another. I want to attempt to bring the iSchool into our school system. This is an idea focused around using apple technologies in the classroom to improve student retention. Retention is IMPORTANT! How else are the students going to learn information on the Alabama High School Graduation Exams? The passing of these 5 parts are the key to a student actually graduating high school and going on to college. If I can just get one of my students to the collegiate level, then my job is worth the struggles that I know are going to befall me.

Tom Johnson's Don't Let Them Take the Pencils Home 

Tom Johnson

I agree that this is a must read for instructors as well as students working to become instructors. Johnson is a very witty character in this scenario. When the woman comes in the room with the argument about the pencils and the students taking them home, I was a little confused. As I continued to read I saw how instead of arguing the problem, Johnson was coming up with solutions to the issue. He sat down with the parents of his students and talked about activities that can be done so that their children did not think of the pencil as a tool of entertainment but a tool of education. 

As an educator, issues are on how you wish to run your classroom is always going to be there. If you are smart, you will figure out solutions to these arguments made by others. If you feel as though your students are going to benefit from what you are doing and it is showing in the student's test scores, then keep doing what you are doing. Education is all about working with the future generations to ensure that there is a future to look forward to. Enable them to think on a much broader scale then just a textbook. Teach your students how they can advance in this ever changing world. Teach them how to take and give criticism. Teach them how to set goals. Teach them how they can make a difference. BE AN EXAMPLE! BE A MENTOR! BE A COUNSELOR! BE AN EDUCATOR!