Tuesday, February 23, 2010
3:34 AM | 
Posted by
FUSION
What do you guys know about education? Even more simply, what is an education? Is it just making an individual a mature or smart person? Or is it a form of a long term standardized plan to make an individual a successful person? Well… From my personal opinion, it is neither of those. It is an understanding of important values of knowledge, inspiration, collaboration, motivation, vision, creativity, and ability to stand up from failure. Thomas Edison never finished grade school and still he is recognized as the greatest inventor. He could achieve his position because he knew how to research, collect organized data, and incorporate into his motivation and creativity. Sadly, current schools do not work that way. They just simply give too many facts to memorize for exams without any important purpose giving students no motivation at all. Absolutely, exams do not measure people knowledge, intelligence, or personal ability; it does not measure how to collaborate with others effectively, how to do critical thinking, or how to motivate personal values to achieve. It just fills bunch of words like a dictionary in people’s mind. How would a collection of words have value to students? No, word itself doesn’t have a value. People must learn how to incorporate those words into their motivation, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking, and of course, education exists to help them put into action.
Students (especially young students in high school) are very likely to be influenced by parents. When they are young, most of them think that their main reason for education is to go to a college and then have a nice job. This is because parents have brainwashed them. They are very unlikely to think about the little details that will face them in college. In the video of Vision of Students Today from Kansas State University, Michael Wesch asked students “what is it like being a student today?” And more than 200 students collaborated to his question. There were many shocking comments. First, one student said that most of his classes there are more than 110 students in a lecture hall and many of those students are doing something else either texting, or playing with laptops. Second, many of them spend hundreds of dollars only in text books each semester and they never open it. Third, those who read the text book read only 49% of assigned readings and 26% are useful for their life. Finally, technology and internet are making students to spend additional hours in front of their computer web surfing or social networking. Their time reading books and studying is decreasing as the internet becomes even more powerful. In addition, the availability of wi-fi in college campuses, the availability of 3G network in mobile devices, and allowance of laptops during lecture will continually harm learning motivations of students.
Professors should control behaviors of students. They should not just give them some assignments and exams, and judge their performance only on those scores. Rather than just giving boring lectures with ppt presentations, it will motivate students better if professors provide a conversational and interactive lecture. In addition, a college or university must provide students as much as many professors possible. 1:100 ratios are nothing good in educating people. It must be at least one professor per 30 students where a professor can help each student motivate to achieve. The greatest achievers or outliers use motivation and inspiration to overcome failures and barriers. Teaching with exams and memorization takes away the desire to learn from students. Every student in the world is able to become a millionaire, only if they vision, research, and process alternative solutions and always seek for an opportunity.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
About Me
- FUSION
- I am a Korean, but grown up in Guatemala; therefore, I have seen important and sometimes harsh educational issues on various ethnical groups. I think it is very important for everyone to learn and think more about how different learning methods and problems affects society and economy as a whole.
EDU
0 comments:
Post a Comment