This reminds me a lot of our first week of class. What is the ideal with critical pedagody? The machine based hyperefficient learning idea is from an old culture of what teaching is for. What is the sci-fi future ideal, now?

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I really wanted to be able to post this week (even now I’m commenting on my phone, my computer hates me) exactly for this. I like everything you brought up and I’d like to see it applied to our classroom setting. The room we’re in seems to have been built with maximizing the range of technologies in mind rather than a class. Isn’t it all rather distracting?

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Yes! The thing you said that resonated most with me here is how we talk about our brains as “like computers”. This has bothered me for so long, we may not know much about neuroscience yet compared to a tehnology we invented,
but that doesn’t mean we should look at ourselves as “like our technology”! I’ve always theought that should inspire more neuroscientists. ngu. My apologies if there are typos here, for some reason I can’t see the text in the box as I type. said that res

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Thanks for posting the picture! I should probably clarify that I’m not an archaeologist, though. I’m in Paleontology.

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I found myself rolling my eyes at Freire constantly when he went on a tangent about politics. There were definitely good points in his writing, you did an awesome job of pulling those out in your bulleted lists, but I definitely got the impression that his idea of good writing was to be long winded whenever possible.
I think that with Freire’s position on politics in the classroom, like with a lot of points of contention in teaching, he serves the purpose of setting up an extreme. A positive take-away I got from his manifesto was that I’m not hitting up against the edge of what is considered appropriate in my classroom if we engage in difficult conversations. There is at least a chunk of people who think that inserting way more of your opinion in the classroom is appropriate. I do worry that he didn’t really understand the power dynamic of teachers and students, despite warning against forgetting that it exists.

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Hi Kushboo, the Freire writing also reminded me of the week we talked about mindfulness. I also struggled with how to ask certain questions in high school so as not to offend my teacher. I always wanted to know what the real-world applications were in my math classes, but its hard to get your teacher to hear genuine interest when they expect to hear “when am I ever going to use this?”.

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This (Cherice’s post and both of the comments so far) is so helpful for the concerns I’ve had about going into teaching junior and female (even with the benefits of race in my case). I had considered transparency as a way to get students to engage, but not as a respect-builder. Honestly, I glazed over the writer’s section on making activities and pedagogy transparent and didn’t fully consider the potential significance of this.

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I think gender be a major factor in why you found Dell’s point about maintaining a boundary between yourself and students surprising. When I read that, it stood out as one of the biggest issues I face as an instructor. I haven’t encountered any trouble teaching at the university level yet, but I have heard from female faculty that students are very likely to really push the boundaries of a student-teacher relationship for their female instructors, and being friendly in the way that your professor was could worsen the unrealistic expectations students may have of them (not respecting deadlines, bringing up personal issues at office hours, disrespecting their authority, etc.). Contrarily, if a female professor isn’t warm she risks being labeled by students in rude and inappropriate ways. A few come to mind from what I heard from peers in undergrad, but none are appropriate to be repeated.

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It was really interesting to hear your perspective on national examinations in China because it is so different from my experience with national exams when teaching in Tanzania (as different as the countries themselves, probably, and they are worlds apart from one another in many ways). I can see how other countries’ national exams could with the right circumstances act the way China’s did for you, as a way to get equal footing with those who have started with privileges you didn’t have access to. However, I think it might be also be good to say a bit about the effects of national exams in TZ, as I believe they are essentially the opposite.
The scores students receive on their exams determine whether they can stay in school and what career paths they can take after school, but only students with considerable privileges have a chance at receiving a decent score. There, poor students and kids from rural areas are severely disadvantaged, often not having teachers in some of the subjects they will be tested on. It is theoretically possible for a student who could afford the textbooks to study alone for the test, but even then, these books are in their second or third language, as is the test (offered in English only). Given these challenges, you need to be born in the right location, have a wealthy enough family, have a gift for language-learning or go to a private English-medium school (school is not taught in English until two years before the first English national exam), have the luck to have teachers in all of your subjects, and on top of all of that do the work of preparing for your exam. If you don’t have at least a few of these advantages, success on the exams is nearly impossible. In these ways, national exams in TZ are a ceiling put over many Tanzanians rather than a rope they can pull themselves onto a new socioeconomic level by as you’ve experienced them in China.

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Thanks, Amos. I think that mindfulness is something you can keep or lose track of, so I would think that the concepts of mindless and mindful learning are mostly separate. However, I’ve definitely had the experience of being so focused on one aspect of an activity that I forget to be mindful of another important part of it. I can image that even if you’re trying to be mindful while taking in new information there are still things you’ll do “mindlessly” at the same time.

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