How do we learn?

I think schooling helps with a childs personal growth. I believe that a person's basic social skills are learned at a young age and school is a major contributer to this. Growing up in Massachusetts I had never heard of home-schooling. That was something that I guess is not prevelent up north like it is in North Carolina. Upon moving here, I met a family who prefers home-schooling and in my opinion, I believe that they are doing a disservice to their children. I was there one day during "school" time and honest to goodness they spent one hour working on school work and then they were done. What kind of education is that? It is a pretty pathetic one, in my opinion. Their children are also receiving a bias education, when it comes to religion and sciences. Just because you may not believe in something, does not mean that you should not learn about it (evolution). They are also lacking social interaction with other children. They only interact with their siblings on a daily basis. They do, however, have what is called Friday school, which is a meeting of a group of home-schooled children on Fridays. That is the least that can be done for those children. School is definitely not only about academics, the bus ride to and from school, after-school sports, lunch in the cafeteria, etc. all of these elements of school are very important to the personal growth of a child.

After reading the text and watching the videos this week, I have realized that there is not only one proper way of teaching a child. Some children are visual learners, others learn verbally, and many need to take the hands on approach. An effective teacher uses multiple teaching styles in order to reach all of the children in the classroom.

My results from the learning styles assessment were that I am more of a visual learner. I agree with those results. I have always needed to see what I was trying to learn, it helped me. Flashcards have always been my number one tool in studying. They are very useful to me.

In chemistry class in high school, our class was told to memorize the perodic table of elements. At first glance, we were scared. A classmate and I decided to study together. Her idea was to just "memorize" the elements as they appeared in the chart. I told her that there was no way that I could do that successfully, so I came up with another idea. It may sound funny, but it worked for us. We associated the letters with a funny saying that we could remember. For example: AU is gold and we said that "gold is Always Universal as a gift" AG is silver so, "Almost as Good as gold" and so on. I can not remember exactly what grade I received, but I know that I did good. It actually turned that awful task into something that was sort of fun.

The Best and Worst Teachers!

Most people that end up teaching have ususally always wanted to become a teacher. I do not fall into that category. After graduating from a community college with my associates degree, I then started at NC State for my bachelors degree, studying to become an accountant. During my second semester I found that accounting was not something that I would "love" to do for the rest of my life. I have always enjoyed math, especially algebra, but in my opinion, teachers do not make as much money as they should. Educators have one of the most important jobs and their pay does not reflect their importance. The pay scale is one of the reasons why I did not start out studying in the education field. Now that I am older and truly understand that life is not only about money, my long-term happiness is now my focus, which I believe would come from teaching mathematics.
I have been trying to recall my best and worst teachers and it has not been as easy as one would think it would have been. They are not jumping out at me like I would have hoped. My worst teacher definitely comes to mind a lot easier than my favorite teacher. In my early college years at a community college I had a professor that was foreign and English was not his first language. Not only was there a large language barrier to cross, but his teaching skills, in my opinion, were not that good. His idea of a lecture was to show the class all of the pictures and diagrams that were located in the book, over the projector. In the end, I feel that I did not retain any of the information throughout the semester that I had learned.
My favorite teacher, on the other hand, was great. She would lecture, usually using power point slides, but she would also get the class involved with hands on activities. It was not only about taking notes, which usually affects any students attention span, our class had a lot of group discussions. I think I received a 106 average in that class, not because I had no life and all that I did was study, but because my professor made the material fun and understandable. I really learned a lot in that class and I actually still remember a large majority of the information to this day.