YouTube reviews

As I watched the YouTube videos I started to think about our concept of teaching, educating, and learning. I disagree almost entirely with two of the videos, and agree almost entirely with only one. Teachers are not necessarily mirrors. In my experience growing up in school and being in class doing some teaching, observing, and grading, teachers do not have as much influence as the video wants us to believe. Even with the most upbeat, caring, energetic teachers I have seen students be lethargic, apathetic, and negative within the classroom. This is evident in my current assignment with my teacher. She has a group of students that are in a slower curriculum called "CORE" that lumps together students that are not on par with the majority of students in the high school. She teaches the history section of CORE, and there are two other teachers: one for science and one for English. These students know that they are in the slower curriculum, and knowing so, they are less likely to "put forth the effort" like other students in my teacher's other classes do, even if they are on the border of failing. The teacher I am observing tries to generate interest by incorporating newspaper articles that the students read at the beginning of class into a discussion and she tries to instill some positive response from the class, but the students still do not respond like the mirror the video suggests.

The other video I disagree with is the "Do You Teach or Do You Educate?" video. My philosophy sees both as being the same. Teaching and educating both involve a teacher, mentor, or other leading figure to improve knowledge in a certain area, in my philosophy. There are many ways to go about this, and no single way is inherently more successful than another. The video argues that teaching is just filling information into someone's mind, and that educating is directing someone down a path to something, it does not say what, but I estimate that it is an answer or knowledge. I don't believe that is really any different than the video's definition of teaching because leading or guiding someone is still placing a philosophy of one person on another, the one thing my entire life philosophy, not just educational philosophy, tries to totally avoid. We should not be telling others what to believe or trying to guide them to an answer. We should do what one quote (the only part of the video I agree with) states: "Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel." Guiding and leading someone is filling a vessel with a biased opinion. Sparking someones interest in a subject and asking questions about their interest and beliefs, that is what I believe is the objective of a teacher or mentor. Not leading someone in a direction or guiding them down a path, but opening new options and discoveries for them and letting them take in what they want and how they are going to use it in life. That is what I believe education should be.

The montage of clips from movies almost embodies my educational philosophy down to the letter. I have seen a majority of the movies that were used, and it shows the many different aspects of what a classroom can be like. Sometimes you have an unruly classroom that doesn't listen to the teacher, or even any school authority, sometimes you have students that don't want to be in school, and you even have students that aren't being challenged enough. You have the administrators that are out to get particular students, you have teachers that aren't sure about themselves, teachers that slack when it comes to grading, unorganized teachers, controlling teachers, and teachers that dare to defy curriculum and popular theories that don't work and inspire the students to look beyond what is in front of them and expand the views of their students. The second half of the video displays these teachers that inspire students to break free from what is in a book and learning it just for the sake of learning it and taking the information and finding their own way to use and interpret their new knowledge. This affects the future lives of our students and other people in the world. Whether it is calculating the physics of a rocket's trajectory, breaking free of the mold that society accepts without thinking, even inspiring and motivating a class to improve their schoolwork (because everyone knows grades are the most important, instead of shaping a new and better future by opening the doors to undiscovered results, ideas, and philosophies) or challenging the minds of students that could not pass basic math addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division to shoot for passing AP Calculus and proving to them that the students themselves control how and what they do with the information that is given to them, teachers need to give their students the chance to explore new idea and concepts, not confine them to what a book says and what people consider "essential information" that everyone needs to know.