Aaron Eyler
Synthesizing Education Blog
Aaron is a high school history teacher in New Jersey. He wrote this blog because he wants to engage more of the educational community in understanding how to develop a student's mind. He also is trying to find a suitable PhD program and he just wanted a blog so he could write down some of his ideas. There's something he says in his "About me" section of his blog that is very interesting. He says, "Once we believe we have it all figured out, we become dumb." Great statement.
His most recent post is dated December 29, 2010. It's called Calling All Political Junkies Who Care About Kids. He wrote a short post on how he wants to create a political commentary blog for his students so they can understand and break down the current issues in a way that they can understand. My comment has disappeared that I wrote for some reason. I don't know why it's not there anymore so I decided to comment it on it again. I guess it didn't pass moderation. Haha!
I summed up what I wrote the last time on this post. I told him I'm a student in EDM 310 and explained the class to him. I said I have a previous degree from Auburn University in Political Science and thought it was very interesting that he thought up this idea for his students. I think it's a great idea and said that I think it's very important for kids to learn how to be involved and engaged citizens, however it can be overwhelming to understand or have a desire to learn with the media and everything making it so complicated. I asked him how his blog was coming along.
He doesn't have anymore recent posts so I'm having to go back in time for my comment on this one. This post was on December 16, 2010 and it's called You Get One Shot At This... He talks about how we are too busy in life to really think about what we're learning. Teachers aren't teaching persistence because when students fail an assignment, they aren't allowed to redo it to improve their work. They just move on to the next task at hand. He says that a huge component of learning is the ability to reflect on what was done and make improvements on it. I have to agree. He says that teachers are hypocritical when they say, "you need to understand this concept before you can understand future concepts," but teachers find it perfectly acceptable to pass them understanding only 70-90% of the material. He says it's no wonder kids just become masters of "doing school."
I thought this post was really something to think about. I told him that he has given me very good advice as a future teacher. I told him that I was very good at just "doing school" so I could make good grades and go to college. If I didn't do well on an assignment or test that I just made sure I did better on the next one. I didn't learn from my failures or why I failed....I just knew I made a bad grade and I had to do better next time. I think teachers teach students about persistence in an indirect way. They teach them to try harder next time and give them encouragement that they can complete a current task (which isn't a bad thing), but it's most important for them to teach persistence when they fail the specific task they failed, not to grasp the next new concept and forget about the old one. Students should be able to retry things that they fail at. I never thought about this until he brought this up but it makes a lot of sense. We would just have to find the motivation for students to want to re-learn an old concept.
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