Reflection 7

I learned something important from my observation yesterday. I would love to have the workspace and equipment available to me as a welding and wood shop teacher, but I wouldn't like teaching it as much as i would multimedia subjects. I feel like I can communicate good values better if I am teaching in a field where I already communicate my personal values.

As far as a teaching philosophy goes, I have learned that it is very important for me to know that I am improving people. I remember teachers of mine who were more interested in teaching me to be a better person than they were in teaching me the subject they were supposed to teach. Those were the classes that I learned and developed the most in. I will have to incorporate that into my teaching philosophy somehow.

I recently read a blog post of some guy bashing public schools pretty hard in favor of homeschooling. His main thesis was that public schools are owned by the government and therefore can only teach the values that the government wants people to learn. He spent a considerable amount of time discussing how the government's job is to keep its citizen's in subjection; therefore, public schools can only promote this goal, that there is nothing else they can do; therefore, homeschooling was the only way to combat this. Now, I'm a mixed bag in this subject. I was home schooled, public schooled, and other schooled. I've grown to appreciate lots of different teaching/learning methods and I've come to hate lots of the same. One thing this blogger doesn't bother to do is confront the fact that some parents do not care about their child's education. If it was left up to everyone to educate their children on their own, then the majority of children would go without an education of any kind. I still believe that if we still believe that everyone has a right/responsibility to get education, then we have to put up with a system that isn't efficient, that doesn't grade students effectively, that struggles to meet everyone's needs, that doesn't focus on the individual's needs simply because there are too many individuals to focus on. Mass education is good, but there are certain things that we have to sacrifice if we still want it. Can things be improved? Sure. Can processes become more efficient? Sure. Can we teach better values in public education than we already are? Sure, but better values can only be legislated to a point. This is why I want to teach, because I think students who don't have parents who care about what they're learning have someone who cares. So that values that are missing at home or in their other classes can find them in mine.