Teaching the Next Generation of Teachers by Waters Rich;

Author:Waters, Rich;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Are Requirements Really Necessary?

Every time a town, county, state, or the federal government comes up with a new requirement for students, they have the idea that students could not go through life successfully if they didn’t have this certain knowledge or have this certain set of skills. The people who create all of these requirements really want students to be well prepared for work, college, and life.

As a teacher of prospective teachers, you are faced with educational questions. Is it really true that a student could not succeed without studying a certain requirement? At the same time, is it possible for a student to learn the requirement indirectly? Could a student learn a lot about English, science, history, or any other subject by studying a subject of personal interest like automobile design, the Civil War, local politics, or the dead fish in a nearby pond? In other words, do we always have to have all students studying the same subject at the same time while reading the same textbook and answering the same questions at the same time? Could learning be more individualized?

After you have reviewed the references on individualized instruction, you will see that many educators think standardization is the wrong approach to learning. People are different, and they all learn in their own ways. It is also obvious to the most casual observer that there are many successful people in the world who did not study many of the subjects that today are requirements.

There are obviously many successful people in the world who didn’t have a second year of algebra, or didn’t have the health unit on communicable diseases, or didn’t read Romeo and Juliet, or don’t know how the Civil War started. Yes, it would be good to know all of these things. But is it absolutely necessary that everybody learn them at the same time and in the same way? No.

You can also think of this in another way. One of the jobs of a school is to help students learn about how the world works. Twentieth-century bureaucrats think that this has to be done by classroom teaching of specific courses in history or biology or geometry or civics or any of the other common courses in schools. But the truth is that a person can learn about all of these subjects and more by pursuing answers to the questions students really have.

This might include student questions like where do clouds come from, or where does wealth come from, or where do diseases come from, or why do we have to go to school. The fact is that all human beings want to learn, but they all do NOT want to learn the same things at the same times in the same places.

Each person is unique, and schools should focus on developing that uniqueness. The universe and civilization thrives on and grows from variety and uniqueness in all things, including human personalities. The fact is that many schools already acknowledge the importance of individual differences and they let students pick a book for a book report or maybe choose a project topic.

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