Inventiveness/Creativity

I think that encouraging creativity in schools is extremely important for students. Allowing students to be creative gives them the opportunity to be unique and share their individual ideas. We need students to be inventive and creative so that they can make a difference in the future. In the job market today it is extremely important to be well rounded and be able to think creatively. It seems that most people who succeed and are well off in today's world are creative and willing to try new things. Having these qualities can get you very far in life. Today we seem to focus only on math, English and science. These subjects are important but it is also very important to let students explore their creativity. We need to implement more creative programs into schools like music, drama and art. These classes can help students creativity come out. Sir Ken Robinson made a great point when he said that students seem to grow out of creativity as they get older. This is because they are not given the opportunities to continue being creative and are sometimes afraid of being creative because they don't want to be wrong. It is going to be essential as teachers in the 21st century to make sure we encourage our students to be inventive and creative so that they will be able to survive and go farther in life.

Role Playing Activity

The role playing activity we participated in on Monday night was an interesting way to learn information. I think that the way things were presented made students able to get emotionally involved in what was going on and they might have taken more from this activity then they would have from a lecture. I believe this way of presenting information wouldn't be good for trying to teach facts to students but that it would work better to teach students a concept or idea. The activity allowed students to share their opinion and hear other students opinions which I think is essential in learning. I think that it may have worked better to have had the students read about No Child Left Behind or hear a lecture on it first and then do the activity. This would have allowed us to know more about the legislation before we tried another way of learning information. Overall it was really nice to learn in a different way on Monday night. A lot of classes can get boring or old really fast because the information is presented in the same way every time. I think it's important in a classroom to switch things up and teach in different ways so the students don't get bored and you can reach more students. I think that if students emotions are involved in learning they will learn more or remember the information better.

Passion

Passion is an essential quality for teachers to have. Without passion for what you are teaching the students may lose interest and not learn what they need to learn. In school I was never very good at science. It was the class that I struggled with the most. My junior year of high school I had to take Chemistry and I wasn't looking forward to it at all. I started the class thinking about how I could get through it with a decent grade, but to my surprise I really enjoyed the class. My teacher was so passionate about Chemistry and he loved teaching it. This made me excited to go to class each day and hear what he had to say. He had a way of making Chemistry exciting and making me want to learn it. I can say today that Chemistry is my favorite science class because of this teacher and how fun he made it. I learned so much in that class when at first I didn't even want to be there. He made Chemistry a class that I now enjoy. His enthusiasm for the subject helped me to be willing to listen and excited to learn. I believe this is how all teachers should be. They should be passionate and excited about what they are teaching in order to help the students become more interested and want to learn.