Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
Student teachers: Why you shouldnt try to be buddies with your students – Part 7
When starting out on our careers, we all wanted to be that teacher. The one that will always be remembered, the one that inspires their students to achieve great things, the one their students reminisce about years after they have left school. There are teachers like that – I remember mine – but they don’t achieve that revered status by being a buddy.
Unlike other professions, teaching means you do not spend the majority of your day with your colleagues, but with a group of young people for which you are responsible. However, that relationship is an important one if you are to achieve the primary objective for your day – that of ensuring that learning takes place. Read the rest of this entry »
No CommentsStudent teachers: Why you shouldnt try to be buddies with your students
Making the shift from a college student not much older than the students that are being taught, to a professional teacher, can be a challenging transition for student teachers. It is important not to cross the line and try to be buddies with students because your professional teaching career is what is at stake.
1. Best intentions can be misconstrued.
One of the most serious problems with being buddies with students is that it is simply a lawsuit or at minimum a reprimand just waiting to happen. All too often students or parents will misconstrue the relationship and even if it is well intentioned, you are putting yourself at risk for accusations of improprieties. The potential accusations, true or Read the rest of this entry »
No CommentsFree online resources for academic research
Researching term papers for college and grad school has never been easier. Long hours slogging through dusty card catalogs and endless dimly lit stacks of forgotten tomes is strictly a thing of the past! If you long for a human touch, your friendly reference librarian is still there waiting for you, but these days you’ll probably e-mail her rather than just show up!
Don’t let the ease of on-line research lull you into complacency. Finding a few good sources is not going to impress your professor. Remember that your classmates have access to the same resources, too! If you want to stand out, you have to use on-line resources and you have to use them more judiciously and thoroughly than your Read the rest of this entry »
No CommentsThe Numbers: What Are They?
There’s a question asked by any number of bored sophomores – and hard-working, frustrated adult learners as well – a question many math teachers dread, and that a few of the best welcome: “What does this math stuff have to do with everyday life?”
The question may strike some teachers as rude and aggressive, but it actually has a strong basis. After all, mathematicians themselves stress the fact that theirs is a discipline based on purer and purer abstractions, so that even a problem that may seem the simplest imaginable – for example, the problem of what a number is – requires a high level of theorizing to be answered. In fact, we can come to understand how math Read the rest of this entry »
No CommentsJapanese in America: the Links Between Hiroshima and Hawaii
What is the connection between Hiroshima and Hawaii?
Easy!
Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 triggering the Pacific War, and America dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima four years later to bring it to a close.
That is true, but interestingly, the connections run much deeper than that and go back to the late nineteenth century when the boom in the Hawaiian sugar industry attracted large numbers of male Japanese migrant workers who were seeking to escape difficult economic conditions in Japan as that country underwent modernization.
At first the workers came from the Yokohama area of Japan. However, they did not prove satisfactory, so more docile and harder working Japanese from Read the rest of this entry »
No CommentsWhere college students like to do homework and what this reveals about their personalities
The library, the quad, the park across the street. There are a million creative places that a student can choose for homework, tests, and readings.
The dorm is the most logical choice, being the most friendly and comfortable. Students in their rooms are easily interrupted by friends, roommates, calls from home, and the IMing on the computer. The place to be for anyone who works best with over-stimulation.
The cafeteria is the place that the multitasking students go-sitting at a table for hours with food in front of them and hoping that the material will be sopped up into their brains like soup. This is the hideout of the overworked student who doesn’t block in personal Read the rest of this entry »
No CommentsStudent teachers: Why you shouldnt try to be buddies with your students – Part 6
This is a topic of interest that really sets my mind in motion. What parent, in today’s world, would want their son or daughter to be buddies with their student teacher? Student teacher’s are completing their education in order to obtain their teaching degrees. In my opinion, when a student teacher crosses the line of being buddies with their students, they should not be issued their degrees. This may sound kind of harsh, but in all reality, teachers are not hired to be the student’s best friends.
Student teachers should be professionals when completing their education in the classroom. This means that students should respect their student teachers as well as Read the rest of this entry »
No CommentsThe best school fund
The bake sale, the talent show, the “buy candy to save the school band”, the “buy wrapping paper to get a kidney transplant for the science room’s bet kookaburra, Steve”, and singles night in the teacher’s lounge. All these fund raising ideas are effective, but sorely played out. Don’t you think it’s about time we brought these tired education income sources into the new millennium? Well, regardless of what you think, it is.
School’s need money and citizens would rather buy out of season gift labels and cookies of dubious origins rather than just pay a slight increase in taxes. Go figure. But, be that as it may, the bake sale is born out of this payment distinction. But what with Read the rest of this entry »
No CommentsThe pros and cons of the Harry Potter series for elementary school students
The Harry Potter series, written by author J. K. Rowling, is very popular among elementary school students, older kids, and even adults! With the seventh and final book in this series due to come out on July 21, 2007, the excitement is building, as the world waits to find out what will happen in the last book of the Harry Potter series.
But, are the Harry Potter books appropriate for your elementary school aged child to read? There has been some debate about the answer to this question. Ultimately, each parent is going to have to decide that individually, after taking many factors into consideration. It can be a tough decision. Here is some information that Read the rest of this entry »
No CommentsExplaining the unit study approach to homeschooling – Part 9
Unit Studies is a holistic approach. You take a theme, say The Lost Colony at Roanoke Island (the first English colony in North America), and approach it from many different angles such that you cover all the major subjects, such as reading, writing, spelling, math, history, science, art.
Taking our theme of the Roanoke Island Colony you might cover core subjects in the following ways:
Math: Calculate the amount of supplies you’d need for 117 men, women and children for a three month sea voyage. If they departed on April 16, 1587 and arrived at Hatarsk (now called Cape Hatteras) on July 22, 1587 how many days was the voyage?
Science: Navigation, star charts.
Read the rest of this entry »