MUSING OUT LOUD
"At best, schools teach 1 billionth of a percent of the knowledge in the universe, yet we quibble endlessly over which billionth of a percent we should teach."
- Seymour Papert
We need to get teachers to shift away from teaching curriculum and towards teaching children
- Chris Lehman
If you, as a teacher, care more about the subject you're teaching than the subjects you're teaching, there's gonna be a disconnect.
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I don't want to teach you. I want to invest in you. If I invest in you, at the end of the day when you get married and have your first kid, you'll text or DM me and say, "Mr. Mo, I just had my first kid!" That's an investment. When you invest in them, they'll do anything in the world for you.
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That's what teaching is. This is what teacher-bashers fail to realize teaching is.
My 7th grader's impersonation of his teachers: "Here's a bunch of facts. Tell them back to me next week, and you'll get a good grade."
We should pay teachers more and professional athletes less, because kids don't look up to poor people
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do learn history, get jobs teaching it to people who don't listen.
Learning is a verb, and isn't the direct result of having been taught facts.
Don't make the mistake of using grades to teach kids about responsibility, time, management, or compliance. Grades should be about learning.
Gary Stager's 3 Purposes of Education:
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To democratize access to experience and expertise. If kids could have all the access to this experience and expertise at home, formal education would be unnecessary
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To prepare kids to solve the problems that schools haven't even anticipated.
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To introduce kids to things and ideas that they didn't even knew they loved yet.