Palmer’s third chapter speaks about paradox in teaching and learning. He describes paradox, overall, as the inner tension experienced in the heart of every teacher, competing and pulling between laughter and pain, joy and sadness, engagement and apathy. He embraces the soul of the teacher pungently: “teaching...can only be expressed as paradoxes”. Push them yet coddle them, inspire them yet give them thinking time, challenge them yet celebrate their established riches. Parker’s description brings into light the true tension in the hearts of teachers, balancing forces of emotion, identity, intellect, and truth.
Palmer discusses six major ideas of paradox in teaching. Palmer’s first is space being bound and open. In the classroom, students need to have the freedom to encounter knowledge without restraint. However, if rules and structures are not established, things can become chaotic. For example, rules for sports such as soccer and hockey allow for structure in the game which enables an engaging game (bound). On the field itself, players are open to be creative, in their dribbling, passing, and shooting without restriction (open). The space between the two is where soccer excellence happens.
Palmer’s second example of paradox is hospitality opposing a “charged”. Students need to feel safe in a class for learning to occur. Students, however, should not feel safe enough to put their feet up and nap. Our learning environments need to be electric. As I teach students in my class room if they lay their head down I say: “You can sleep at home!” Creating an engaging, safe environment requires an acute sense of the nature of the students and the ability to know when a stretch break is not needed but required....
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...iving money is not smart or safe but buying someone a coffee or sandwich or helping at a soup kitchen is a healthy form of social justice. Add a parable about Lazarus and the students have a healthy balance between the binding word of God and the openness of how we can serve Jesus in our lives.
Overall, Palmer’s description blends nicely to the vocation of teaching through another lens in teaching and learning and that is virtue. Virtue is not a balance with another vice but a middle ground between two extremes. For example, fortitude is not counter balanced with gluttony, but rather fortitude is a middle between laziness and recklessness. The inner landscape of a teacher is filled with many similar paradoxes, that challenge teachers to walk the middle road, to engage students to encounter their material, ask questions, and pursue life-long learning.
Greene, Maxine. "Teaching as Possibility: A Light in Dark Times." (n.d.): n. pag. Web. .
For generations teachers have been developing our future through harmony, wisdom, and intellectual adventure. A teachers' role in society is to help our youth grow and further their understandings in the principles of life. The expository essay The Role of the Teacher by Irving Layton provides a different perspective on education in the 21st century. Similar to Layton, I firmly believe that education is for the expansion of the young mind and nothing should restrict a student's ability to do so. Layton touches on a view where teachers need to be passionate about their jobs, however, teachers are not always responsible for every action the school makes, but the responsibility may lie in the hands of the school board. Layton also displays his concern for the decreasing rate of young readers and the use of humanities and how that will affect society. Personally I have been influenced by teachers in my own family. There have also been other teachers who have influenced me like I have also had other educators such as in my math course where the diversity in the techniques and skills used affected my overall experience.
The book Lives on the Boundary, written by Mike Rose, provides great insight to what the new teaching professional may anticipate in the classroom. This book may be used to inform a teacher’s philosophy and may render the teacher more effective. Lives on the Boundary is a first person account composed of eight chapters each of which treat a different obstacle faced by Mike Rose in his years as a student and as an educator. More specifically in chapters one through five Mike Rose focuses on his own personal struggles and achievements as a student. Ultimately the aim is to highlight the underpreparedness of some of today’s learners.
When discussing the roles of teachers, the saying “With great power, comes great responsibility,” comes to mind. This quote is famously known to be in the Spiderman movies, but in addition to this, it also applies to instructors. These authorities have an underestimated job to fulfill in society, and that is ensuring that the children are well taught and succeed. In the essay Of The Education of Children, Michel de Montaigne touches upon a crucial point that can be found within the flaws of today’s educational system. Throughout history, while the curriculum is being altered, the method in which it is taught is not. Montaigne states that bookish learning is an inadequate way of learning. It is good start, but a foundation should not be built based on it. He then goes on to say, “A sentence pressed within the harmony of verse darts out more briskly upon understanding, “ (Montaigne 1). This is a principle that should be focused on to help guide educational practices. Nowadays, children have a shocking amount of access to electronics, which has shortened their attention spans – an issue that was not present 100 years ago.
It doesn’t have to always be wealth associated. Social Justice can simply mean helping the teen moms at a local high school gain commitment to their bodies, purity, and celibacy. Chicago is an outreach environment especially for the homeless. Every year or every other year, I make it my priority to provide a care package for the homeless individuals that are homeless in the downtown area of Chicago. Those care packages includes kleenox, bandaids, a pair of socks, deodorant, mouth wash, food, and if possible a coat or a blanket. I usually go the weekend before Thanksgiving or the weekend before Christmas. I also include little encouraging letters in there, bible verses, food pantry information and shelter information. The first year doing this I was nervous, but when I saw the smiles on their faces, I was encouraged and continued to do
Education is constantly being redefined and has many different interpretations. The education system tends to be flawed at certain points but it may only be because each teacher has different methods of teaching their students or they just don’t care about their students futures. Three short essay writers talk about their own experience in the education and the positive and negatives to them. For example, Mary Sherry 's "In Praise of the "F" word” Sherry illustrates how students with a fear of failing would motivate them to try harder in school and make an effort to do well and succeed. Marry Sherry points out that “Before a teacher can expect students to concentrate, he has to get their attention, no matter what distractions may be at hand”(565).
Teaching in schools, and being ethical while teaching have been complex activities that occur within different and entangled webs of ethical, moral, social, historical, cultural and political relationships and settings. We need to redefine the role of teacher and a valuable way to think about the ongoing education of teachers...
In the article “The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher,” written by the teacher John Taylor Gatto, he sarcastically talks about how he secretly teaches his students lessons in life without their knowing. His messages teach important things in life such as patience and organization. Gatto’s lessons like these are important for people to learn in school, but they cannot be taught out of a book or in a lesson. He believes these types of lessons must be taught to children within hidden messages to make it easier to learn. Gatto is speaking the truth when he says that the lesson plans of teachers contain much hidden curriculum. For example, Gatto jokingly says that he teaches confusion as one of these mysterious le...
Reflection is a necessary component of everyday life, as well as the growth an individual makes within their profession. This concept remains true for teachers who, due to the particular changes they must make in order to meet the fluctuating needs of both their students and society, are perpetually connected to reflection. Beginning with John Dewey, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, numerous scholars have articulated their viewpoints concerning the positive and negatives impacts of this reflective teaching, in addition to its influence on the moral dilemmas faced by educators. One of these people, Elizabeth Campbell, asserts her perspectives throughout her text, The Ethical Teacher, wherein she describes the relationship between ethical knowledge and moral agency, the link between moral dilemmas and ethical knowledge, and the methods of lessening moral tensions in education.
In today’s culture teachers are belittled and expectations for them are high. On the surface a teacher may just seem like one person doing one job, but a teacher is someone who fulfils many different roles daily. One role is the role of a friend in which teachers are encouraged to build empathetic friendships to meet a students’ needs and keep them accountable in the classroom (2.2), this means learning about their home life, hobbies, and interests. TESOL teachers must have strong moral and ethical behaviors because they celebrate the different lives lived out by each student.
Many new teachers face a problem when they begin teaching: they are lost on how to create a classroom environment and how to teach because they haven’t taught before. According to The Journal of Adult Education, “Quite often the only barometer they have in assessing the type of teacher they would like to be lies in past experiences of previous professors (Leger & Young, 2014; Reid, 2009; Worley, 2001).” (Hegarty 2015). This phenomenon leads to teachers instead of reflecting on who they want to be as teachers, based on the kind of teacher they liked and disliked in the past. In this paper, I will reflect on this and come up with my own teaching philosophy.
Teachers face with a lot of daily choice problems, such as, how classrooms and curriculums should be organized, how students' behaviors should be interpreted, how learning time can be protected, and others. Sometimes these problems seem to be so ordinary that, teacher need to solve the problem automatically. But in the teaching process there are also complicated choices about difficult problems that, if left unaddressed, often increasing. These difficult choices call for teachers to engage in sophisticated reflection (including self-reflection).
My teaching career has been spent learning how to provide appropriate support, guidance, patience, & understanding, as well as to enhance academic growth & success, for all students. My purpose as a teacher is to enrich and inspire the lives of young students with moderate/intensive needs by providing access to information instead of functioning as the primary source of information for students to flourish. My teaching methods will be to create an environment ripe with opportunities for discovery and exploration which will allow all students to learn at their own pace, generate questions and construct knowledge, while providing hands-on practice of skills in authentic situations as well as to make learning intriguing and meaningful to all students. Carefully planned and constructed learning environment will also allow the teacher more time to meet the individual needs of each student. Another important factor to a well-prepared learning environment is to facilitate learning, and providing students with balance and consistency (2004). Young students require a balance between various classroom dimensions, including activities guided by the teacher and independent work, quiet work and active work, gross motor and fine motor activities, and open and closed aspects to the curriculum and classroom materials (2004). Consistency is also a required condition for learner success. Schedules (daily and weekly), the enforcement of classroom rules, and student expectations should not be in flux but remain consistent. Without a sense of consistency in the classroom, school life would lack the necessary feeling of safety and reliability young children need to focus, to take risks, and to t...
Along these two weeks we have been prompt to make a recall to our own way of learning and why we became a teacher: Was it because coincidence, due to life circumstances, maybe because family tradition, was it a conscious decision or because someone influenced us? Whatever the answer is, we have to face reality and be conscious that being a teacher does not only means to teach a lesson and asses students learning. It requires playing the different roles a teacher must perform whenever is needed and required by our learners, identify our pupils needs and preferences, respecting their integrity and individuality but influencing and motivating them to improve themselves and become independent.
Pike, B., & Bradley, F. (1997). The philosophy of teaching: Developing a statement that thrives in the classroom. Clearing House, 70(3), 125. Retrieved October 6, 2011 from http://library.gcu.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=9703092460&site=ehost-live&scope=site