One of my favorite moments as a teacher is when my students tell me they used something I taught them outside of the classroom. I spend a lot of time and effort teaching, engaging, discussing, and disciplining in order to get my students to where they can be successful on my tests or performance tasks.
I feel immense pride when I see that by and large the class has “gotten it”, meaning that they have performed well on the summative or “final” assessment for the Chapter or Unit. I usually have the students complete some informal assessments (usually learning games) before we start a Chapter or Unit to see what their prior knowledge is.
For U.S. Government, a lot of times the students come in with a lot of “transfer”…meaning that they already had some knowledge of the subject. Classes usually do pretty well on tests for Government. If they don’t study they may not get an A, but they can at least pass the test.
Economics can be a little more tricky as there are a lot of subject specific words and concepts that are not part of our normal lexicon. I learned that I have to spend a lot of time on these subject specific words and concepts to get students to where they could consistently demonstrate a good understanding of Economics.
The best moments though are the ones where students tell me that they engaged someone about a political topic that we covered in class, or used an economic principal to help them make decisions at their job.
“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
W.B. Yeats
I get a lot of questions about the stock market, and how to invest in different things. I feel a special sort of spark within me when this happens. It sort of reminds me that I am in fact, making a difference and making student’s lives better.
Thanks for stopping by The Lifelong Learning and Education Blog! Going to the Dodger game tonight, feeling markedly better, but still want to sleep all the time. Check out my latest posts if you have a moment.
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What are your thoughts on this?