Blog Post 10

Do You Teach or Do You Educate?

This video is about the difference between merely teaching, and educating. And just to be sure the creator, "pierre722," had all his facts straight, I looked up the definition of each in The Oxford Encyclopedic Dictionary--yes, they really do mean two different things. As the video states, teaching is giving students facts, showing them how to do stuff, informing them about things, making them understand something, etc. Basically, it's what most people think teaching is. Educating (which is how I've always thought about teaching, even if most of my past teachers have not lived up to the meaning in my eyes) is about inspiring and empowering students with their knowledge. A mentor who guides and opens knew doors for you. That's how I've always seen teachers, perhaps in no small part because of the movie Dead Poets Society.

John Keating, of the movie, is the kind of teacher I would like to be--hopefully without the tragedy involved. I don't want to just talk to my students about writers, and read stories, and test them on the contents of those stories, and make them write essays about those stories. I want to inspire in my students a love for literature. I want to show them how writers of the past have affected society, that the written word is important. I want them to understand that their opinions are important, too. And I want to open that door to them, to let them know there is always a possibility that they can change the world, and that writing can be a vehicle for that change. Actually, scratch all that "want" crap. Those are all the things I will do. I will be that kind of teacher, I will.

Don't Let Them Take Pencils Home

I had no idea what to expect when I read the title of this post by Tom Johnson. I was even more confused when I started reading, because he and someone else were politely arguing over whether allowing students to take pencils home was a good thing or not. Of course, I finally understood that it was a metaphor for personal computers, especially after looking around his blog and realizing that every post is like that. His characters are teachers in the 1800s, who are slowly integrating pencils (computers) into their school.

In this post, the main character, Tom, is confronted by another, Gertrude, about allowing students to take home their pencils, because a study has shown that students who take home their pencils have lower test grades. This post is based on another post by Larry Ferlazzo, who talked about the real life version of that study, which "proved" that students from low income families who have personal computers are likelier to have lower grades. This is due to parents in low income families not having much contact with computers in any environment other than one meant for entertainment, so they view computers as entertainment, passing that mentality on to their children. Tom makes the argument to Gertrude that instead of not allowing students to take their pencils home, they change the way people think about computers--I mean, pencils. He even has a plan already worked out and in action to do that, but Gertrude refuses to see his side.

I enjoyed the way he presents his arguments--not just the one in this post, but in other posts, too--as a metaphor enacted by 19th century teachers. It's exactly the kind of mentality I've always had about computers. To me, they're entertainment. But I wouldn't really restrict this mentality to low-income families--whatever my family's income, my mom used computers a lot as a teacher, and yet I still have this mentality. I don't think it really has to do with income, but with the mentality of our society. Computers are marketed as entertainment, and are hardly ever used as educational tools outside of an actual classroom. But it's a whole lot harder to change the mentality of a society as opposed to the mentality of a few parents. So what can we do about it? Educate the parents, then, one at a time, if that's what it takes.