I definitely agree with your point on making sure people aren’t treated differently within a diverse setting. I think this is where people get the idea of “color-blindness”. We are not asking for people to completely ignore one’s race or ethnicity, as it plays a large role in who we are as people, but rather to not use that as a reason to treat people differently. I remember being in a classroom where I was the only non-white student and the professor asked a question about if any students had international experience on something and looked directly at me! It was very uncomfortable and made me feel like an outsider in the class. So your point on professors making sure to treat students without any implicit bias or stereotypes is very important.
Author: Brittany Boribong
Comment on Interdisciplinary Learning by Brittany Boribong
I’m also part of an IGEP (Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology) and I definitely agree that interdisciplinary research is the future! Sticking to a singular disciplinary silo will not progress us much further so we need to work cooperatively with other fields to advance our knowledge. I think it’s great you have an open mind to debate with others and learn new things. The most difficult part of interdisciplinary research is for others to find value in the work and to convince people to learn outside of their discipline.
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Comment on My Role as a Teacher by Brittany Boribong
I also agree that teaching can be scary! We are still students ourselves and yet we’re responsible for shaping the education of those younger than us? Especially, from what I’ve seen, most TAs don’t receive formal training on how to teach. But I like your philosophy of a teacher being a guide to help students in learning, as opposed to being an unapproachable figure.
Comment on DISCOVERING YOUR AUTHENTIC TEACHING SELF by Brittany Boribong
I also like your comment about knowing what students want out of the class. But how do you engage students that only want a grade and not the knowledge? Things have become so competitive that students only care about the A and not learning. How can we inspire them to care?
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Comment on I want my voice be heard in class. by Brittany Boribong
As someone who is in mathematics, I appreciate teachers like your grandmother. So many people have told me that the reason they don’t like math is because of a bad teacher from when they were young. Because it started young, they’ve carried the dislike their entire life. Sometimes I feel like it’s hard to be interactive in STEM but from your grandmother’s experience, it looks like it just takes a little creative thinking and inspiration from other fields!
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Comment on Grading system is a giant monster by Brittany Boribong
I really relate to your post. Grades always seem to be like something hovering over you at all times and rather than being motivated to learn, we are motivated to get good grades. This is how we have students who have 4.0 GPAs but do not understand the basics of their field.
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Comment on Battle of the Grades. The story of my life! by Brittany Boribong
I definitely agree a lot with your post! Like you, when I did poorly on an exam, I was motivate to do better because I was scared of failure, not because I wanted to learn. I agree with Sneha in that classes should have some sort of project at the end in which students can apply the material they’ve learned. In the classes where we’ve had projects instead of exams, I’ve had a much better experience.
Comment on Grades vs. Knowledge Slugfest by Brittany Boribong
I really appreciated this line in your post: “…students are intrinsically trained to view education in a means-ends relationship.” This is both very true and very upsetting. We should value school as a way to receive an education and learn about various topics, but instead we see it only as a path to get to the career we want and don’t fully appreciate what we are experiencing during school.
Comment on Grades vs. Knowledge Slugfest by Brittany Boribong
I really appreciated this line in your post: “…students are intrinsically trained to view education in a means-ends relationship.” This is both very true and very upsetting. We should value school as a way to receive an education and learn about various topics, but instead we see it only as a path to get to the career we want and don’t fully appreciate what we are experiencing during school.
Comment on Everybody has to take the same exam by Brittany Boribong
That cartoon is one of my favorites in showing how educating all students the same way is ineffective. It reminds me of the quote “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” It’s like in the TED talk we watched in the first class where the professor realized his student was struggling because of his addiction to video games and instead of failing him, allowed him to use his passion and talent as a learning tool. As educators, we need to learn how to pull out the talents of individual students and not the masses.
