Week 5: Teaching vs. covering

Okay. Before I address any of the following questions, let me just reflect on the title of this blog: teaching vs. covering. There is a HUGE difference between teaching material and just covering material. To me, covering means being very unattached, disinterested and unenthusiastic. I had a high school science teacher who just covered the material, and I learned nothing in there. However, teaching means you are into what you're teaching; you are, how they say, one with the material. Yes yes, so teaching instead of covering makes a world of difference to the students. Okay, sorry for my babble... onto the questions.
1. In chapter 5, Tomlinson discusses 5 (five) bullet points about the differences between teaching curriculum that is important, and “covering” what she calls “scaling Everests of information [that is] not effective for our students." Choose two of the bullets to explain what they mean to you, and how they help you envision the kind of teacher you want to be.
One of the bullets that I liked was the one that said, "Students, classrooms and educational systems that teach less and teach it better score higher on standardized measures than students that seek coverage of massive amounts of information with little emphasis on understanding. In other words, curriculum that is a mile wide but only an inch deep is ineffective in producing real learning.”
To me, this means to teach deep, not wide. When I hear this saying, I picture in my head a really small pond, but one that is a mile in depth. Then, I picture the Nile, being very long and windy, and shallow. We want to cover less material, but in depth, like the small deep pond. If you teach like the shallow Nile, the students may be taught a wide range of material, but they weren't taught the material in depth; they just skimmed the surface. TEACH DEEP and DON'T SKIM any surfaces! I don't want to be a skimmer... I want to be a diver! (I tried to be metaphorical with the deepness and shallowness... did it work?!)
The second bullet that I liked was the one that said, "The brain is inefficient at rote memorization and seeks instead to make meaning of information. If we don't make meaning of what we study, we are likely not to remember it, be able to retrieve it, or be able to use it".
This really spoke to me because of a personal reason... I wanted to badly to be a dental hygienist before I came to the realization that teaching was more for me; however, I had an obstacle: MICROBIOLOGY! I would go to every one of my classes, take notes, then go home and make flashcards of the notes. I would spend my days and nights neglecting all of my other classes just to memorize the facts that I had on my flash cards. Needless to say, I may have been able to memorize those facts, but when it came to applying those facts in the lab and in class, I didn't pass a single test and got my first and only F in college. Just by memorizing the facts, my brain made nothing of that material. Looking back, I should have spent more time in the lab doing hands-on things to apply the notes I took in class and to actually make more of those notes than just words on a page. This bullet is saying exactly that: If we don't make meaning of what we learn, the information will be meaningless to us. Because of this experience, and being able to compare it to this quote, I need to make sure I don't make this mistake with my students. I need to shun any memorization of facts (unless, of course, memorization is necessary), but I need to definitely enforce the application of information.
2. From chapter 6, share 2 (two) exact quotes that are meaningful to you and explain why they matter to you.
The first quote I liked was the one that says, "Products crafted for an audience that is important to the student generally seem much more compelling and the work that goes into them much more important than when the teacher is the sole audience." To me, this means bulletin boards. Use the walls of the classroom and bulletin boards in the hallways to put up student work. I picture in my head a student and his/her parents walking down the hall, and the student pointing to a board with pride and a smile saying, "LOOK! I DID THAT!" To the student, the teacher seems proud of their work to display it in that manner. Also, in field, my teacher had a bulletin board in the classroom where the students could be free to post up their work if they were proud of it. As students came back in from recess (since the board was by the door to outside), several students would gather around the board and look at every one's work that was posted. I want to do as much as I can as a teacher to show my students that they make me proud every day, and I think that displaying their work is a great way to do this.
The second quote I found was the one that says, "Aim high. It is likely that we underestimate what any student can accomplish, often establishing as performance ceiling goals that ought to be planks in the floor." It is SO important to set high standards for the students and to push them. Not having high standards is a great way to discourage students, and then, they lose motivation. As a teacher, I will be sure to push my students with realistic, yet challenging, expectations. This will require serious planning, because if students aren't challenged, they won't learn as much as they could. However, the level at which students are challenged is different for each student, and that's where the extra effort comes in. Busy work is very BLAH, for lack of a better term. I need to be sure that I am an effective teacher by putting thought into the assignments I give so there will be no such thing as busy work in my classroom!