Many Teaching Styles

There are many different teaching styles to use in a classroom. Teaching styles are usually based off of teaching philosophies. Some teaching philosophies include essentialism, perenialism, progressivism, existentialism, and behaviorism. Essentialism is much like our former President, George W. Bush, was pushing for this teaching philosophy. This classroom would be very disciplined and very basic in terms of the subjects taught. Perenialism is all about students being taught principles and being told to make up their own reasoning through experiments. In progressivism, the idea of the three ways of learning is included; audio, visual, and kinesthetic learners. This idea is based around that each person learns information differently. Existentialism is the most interesting of them all. This classroom is very laid back and students pick more of what they are interested in learning and learn through that way. This type of philosophy deals with student as an individual and wants them to be creative. The last one is behaviorism, the idea that you can condition students to do different things. The idea is called programming them. All of these are very interesting philiosophies. (citation)American education has been leaning towards essentialism when I feel like students need to have a broad and more well-rounded education. They should do creative things, and experiments, and every student should learn in a way that is best for them. Americans definitely need to consider what kind of philosophy they should put in their education system, one that will help students flourish.

We are a melting pot?

So this is what our solution is looking like so far:
- Fix the no child left behind act
- Get more funding for our education system
- Create programs for children that take place out of the classroom
- And we need to found a solid ground in which we go by our teaching
We need something that says THIS IS AN AMERICAN EDUCATION SYSTEM. We have always done things differently here. I mean we are called “the melting pot” so shouldn’t we have an education system that applies to many learners?

What matters Most...

“According to national assessments only 7% of 17-year-olds in the U.S. can solve math problems with more than one step”( What Matters Most 5). (This is an article you can find on the internet by typing in “What matters most: Teaching for America's future. Eventually you will come across a giant report about 150 pages long. In this you will find the authors talking about these statistics.) I find this baffling. I feel 17-year-olds should be able to solve something like this. I feel a main requirement in high school these days is to take up to algebra 2. How could a student achieve so low. I believe it’s because these students slip between the cracks. They either drop-out or they do go to school but because teachers would prefer to pass students and standards are low enough for them to pass the student, students end up graduating. It’s a shame that we cannot point out how poorly a student is and find a way to get them help with what they are struggling with. We should have programs to target certain problems. There could be after-school clubs for these students. Many students do not want to go to these kinds of clubs because they don't want to look stupid, but we as parents and teachers need to encourage free help. In order for our education system to do better, parents and teachers should work together to find solutions to finding ways to give proper help to students.

Budget Cuts :(

Check out this video on budget cuts for Georgia Southern University. Dr. Keel, the president of GA Southern University, talks about restrictions that will be put in place to meet budget cuts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wttThUNntvE

Budgeting

As this is late, but I must mention it because I said I would, was that the poorest state happens to be the bottom three in the best education system in the U.S. I think having money contributes greatly to a state or country’s education system. You need money to pay teachers, make more classrooms, have arts and sports programs, etc. Learning is sometimes not enough to make students enthusiastic about going to school. They need an outlet to focus their attention on. If you cannot pay teachers a decent amount then why would they continue to stay with that career and go to college to teach if they think they wouldn’t make any money. The government does not provide enough funding for their education programs (Citation). Because of this, class sizes get smaller because they can’t afford the teachers they need. We see this on all levels of education, including college (citation). Colleges are what helps those who want to go to the next level and who want to go above and beyond. We should not take away their funding. We all know we are in an economic crisis, but taking funding from education isn’t going to help it get better. If we want to see our education system get better, we need to write to our congressmen to tell them they need to stop taking away funding for programs that we find vital to us, our children, or our friends. We need to tell them to supply more funding to education. We want great people to be attracted to this field so we can have great teachers in our classrooms. I have seen to many teachers who are not properly educated in their field or do not belong teaching. So many things can come from more funding. Why not help students? They didn’t cause this economic crisis.

Sorry

Today as been a very tiring day. I meant to create a blog entry for today but am too tired and feel as though a blog entry on a day where I am not tired would be better.

No child Left Behind...?

So as you can tell I have been really busy because I haven't logged on to post something. I was carefully watching my blog though for comments as well as letting my first post marinate on the internet.
We talked in the last post a little bit about solutions. I feel like we do have a problem. In the United States there are just too many citizens that do not get a great education. Well before I begin talking about solutions I wanted to talk some about the No Child Left Behind Act. If you have some personal insight or feelings about this, please share!
At first I thought the No Child Left Behind act was the idea that no student will stay behind a great anynmore and that everyone will move on. But as I was doing my research for my paper about teaching, I found that my assumnption was wrong. What this act meant, was that schools would have more standards and would have to meet them. This was backed by more standardized testing to assess students on standards. (citation)In all this was a great idea, because those schools that do not produce good students would have to raise their standards. This was good till you found teachers cutting corners and blantantly teaching material that was going to be one the standardized testing. This does not help teaching really at all. If the schools then didn't meet these standards they would recieve extra help or people could get excused form attending that high school. If this high school continues to do bad they would get taken over by the government. They were hoping this would increase standards for schools, but many schools still cannot meet standards.
So the first order of business to refine No Child Left Behind Act. Agree?