blog post 10!

"Do You Teach or Do You Educate?"
Becoming a teacher is what I would say was my calling. By teacher, I mean dance teacher. I took dance for sixteen years of my life and I would always say that I wanted to become a teacher. As I grew older I was babysitting more and finding myself working or entertaining children while at family functions or weddings and what not. After hearing many times that I was great working with children, not bragging by any means, I decided that maybe teaching in a school system was what I am supposed to do. So here I am now, and enjoying every minute of it, even the classes and learning processes that it takes to become a better teacher.
While being a teacher, I hope that I can inspire my students to learn and want to further their education. The students need to know that their education is very important and without it you will not get very far in life. I also want to teach in a low income minority school for the reason being that those students need to know that they are loved and cared for whether they are or arent during their home life. I also want my students to look back and think that they enjoyed school and actually remember what was taught to them and that it is not all about the letter grade they make but if they were to comprehend the materials being taught. On that note, I CAN NOT wait to become a teacher, it cant come soon enough.

Tom Johnston's Dont Let Them Take the Pencils Home!
In this post Gertrude the "School Curriculum Instructional Interventionist Academic Specialist" has picked a fight with Mr. Johnson on how he allows his children to take home pencils so they have a writing utensil to do their homework, but yet Gertrude believes from an article that children who take home pencils from school have a lower standardized test scores. Mr. Johnson is correct on how does a fill in the blank test determine whether a child takes home a pencil and does his homework with it or plays with it?! Gertrude believes from the article that children in low income areas that take pencils home use them as entertainment because their parents may not know what else to do with it. Mr. Johnson starts up a group of parents to help with the pencil becoming a homework or entertainment use. Mr. Johnson has come up with ways for the pencil to become entertaining and want to get the children to interact whether it being homework or playing Hangman, the students are getting something educational out of the pencil.
Learning is a part of life's process. You never finish learning until your life is finished. In this blog post, Mr. Johnson is saying that whether or not they take a pencil home and do their homework or play a game they are learning something. Maybe the students will go back to school the next day and not be able to play outside, or receive a bad grade for not completing their work, which in return they have learned that by not doing their work they have been punished. Mr. Johnson took the problem( taking pencils home could lower test scores) and fixed it with a solution(students may not do work, but play a game but are always learning). Many teachers if were told not to allow their students to take home pencils would quit letting the students take them home and that would be the end of it. Mr. Johnson faced the problem and came up with a successful solution. Randy Pausch once said "brick walls are there for a reason; they let us prove how badly we want things." Johnson came up with the solution to make pencils become interactive, and he got over the brick wall for the problem of allowing children to take pencils home.