Kidz+Thez+Dayz

What ever are we to do with kids these days? It seems that nothing that we say is ever going to get through to them. It seems like when teachers are pouring their hearts into the work of educating and enlightening these young minds the nothing is getting through. The students all seem to want to listen to their music and are both frustrated and angry that the schools are making them put their cell phones away and actually participate in the classes that they are taking. What is a person to do to get through to them? This is the million dollar question. If an educator were to find a method or program that reaches every single student and pulls them each out of their shells. The research is in and the conclusion is great: no one will make a million dollars off of this. There is no one way to reach every student, but that doesn’t stop people from trying to do it. There are educators, novice and well experienced, that carry on in the same format and style of presentation day after day, class after class. They treat each subject that they teach and each student that they are in front of as though they just came off the assembly line as though one method will always work. The field research that they are doing on a continual basis has proven that they are not succeeding. This information gives rise to two new questions. First, if the same method doesn’t work then why are there students that do well with certain teachers? Second, why are there students that start out not too hot and then become better as the time in the classroom progresses? These two questions and the results from them, namely that some students learn and are successful, give the teachers a false sense of accomplishment and they rationalize that the thing that the less prosperous students need is to try harder and they will come to be successful like their classmates. We shall look into these two questions in an attempt to understand the success of certain students. First, the reason that certain students are successful with particular teachers is that these teachers happen to teach in the method that agrees with these students’ learning preferences. It is simply a happy coincidence. In a high school Precalculus class that I have the pleasure of teaching there is one student that had been sitting in her chair doing nothing for three weeks. Her friend had transferred out of the class and now she did not want to be there. In the course of my teacher training the time came for me to lead the class for a time. Over the course of about two weeks this student began to do something. She started on the third day of my unit to listen to the class discussion. Next, she got out paper and started to take notes. She even looked as though she was about to raise her hand a couple of times to add in her ideas to our discussions. It was a great transformation to see. This does not mean that I teach better than the normal teacher. It means, most likely, that there is something in the way that I teach that reaches the heart of this student. She has yet to do a homework assignment for the class, but at least she is now writing down what the assignment is. She is doing this simply because she is hearing something that speaks to her personally. Second, students gain success over time, many of the times, because they are smarter than we give them credit for. There are many students out there that are highly creative. They have a way of adapting to the environment that they are placed in. If a student that normally would respond well to a lecture laden class is placed into a room of activity and discovery they will be lost for the first little amount of time. Eventually, these students will begin to reach out and find things in the class that they can use to meet their needs of lecture and structure. This can be something as simple as reading the book and doing extra research to find new information to absorb. Once this is assimilated into the student’s mind, he or she will be able to participate with the others in the class due to the theoretical knowledge that has been gained. A second year algebra student of mine was speaking to me the other day and mentioned that math has just never worked for her. I told her that is wasn’t the math it was the presentation. Each person can do math and can be successful at it. The trick is to find what works for her. It may be that she needs more hands on experience about the ideas that we are covering in class. It might be that she needs the information presented to her in terms of money or computers, or music, but there is something out there in the world that is her key to unlocking her mind’s acceptance of mathematical postulates, rules and theorems. As her teach it will be my honor to help her come to find what these connections might be. The problem comes in the knowledge that I cannot teach directly to her. What I can do, however, is integrate her key into the rest of the lessons so that at least part of what I do each day will talk directly to her. These ideas are a little difficult to implement. To be successful in them we as teachers need to be as wise as what we want our students to be. We need to reach out to new methods of presentation and, instead of abandoning our current methods outright, we need to bring these other pieces into the puzzle and put it all in there together. Teachers need to be able to motivate the students that want a little extra push to get them there, be the expert for the students that want very technical answers, coach those students that simply need to know how to do something, and lead students through making real world connections with material to help those that look a little beyond the mark to ask about the possibilities that still wait in the world for them. These are not the independent roles that they sound to be, but they do take practice to incorporate each of them into the daily lessons that we teach. With practice it can be done; is that not what we tell our students when they try to say how hard the new material is. Ideas for the content of this article came from http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Papers/Understanding_Differences.pdf and http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ILSpage.html.