I agree with parts of what you said about Palmer and his “ideal” educational system. I think it is one thing to point out the problems and make suggestions about what to do, but it a whole different thing to put those suggestions into action. However, personally, I think the best point you make is about making the system “function on the real.” There are plenty of ideal and wishful thinking that people want in their work or lives, but it isn’t always realistic. Solutions have to be practical and applicable to what is available. You have to work within the resources available to you. You can suggest how to be more aware or more inclusive in the classroom, but you can’t be everything to everybody. Sometimes what you think is the correct response to help someone, but it won’t be. We have to be aware of the balance between what the reality of the situation is and what the ideal situation would be in order to work within the confines of the resources we have available to achieve it. We don’t have unlimited resources in the workforce or educational environment, but most of all we don’t have it within ourselves. Yet, we do have the ability to embrace the reality of our situations and be creative with working to achieve best case outcome for ourselves and others.

I really enjoyed your post. I think for this entire semester I have struggle with the question of why I came to graduate school. I didn’t come to make more money; I came to find a path to a career, but it gets hard to keep that in perceptive at times especially when I’m a struggling students. Education and learning can sometimes be tricky to keep in focus and perceptive, because there is a lot of pressure and expectations. And nowadays, there is no guarantee that you will leave college with a job. Sometimes, I look at higher education as a gamble and that’s why people find themselves going to college for the wrong reasons. They didn’t think about the whole picture before they came to school and there are times in education when the concept of “making more money” isn’t going to work because there is no guarantee. That’s why it’s important to remember the reasons why you love to learn or consider what is it beyond the money that is pushing you through school.

I think you touch on a lot of great points about multitasking and being productive. I think multitasking and having these constant connections with the Internet can be really difficult waters to navigate and get through especially in graduate school. Sometimes it takes the hard lesson, but I think sometimes it takes more of expectation check. I try to only multitask when I’m grading and logging in vouchers for my class or doing what is “busy work.” However, I find myself having very unrealistic expectation for when it comes to papers and reading. For some reason, I think I can sit in read all the article for one class in one sitting or I can write a paper without needing a few minutes to step away. I don’t always think about needed ten minutes to step away. In undergrad, I was really good about studying around my attention span. I would study for an hour and then take a fifteen minute break, but I don’t really do that in grad school. I have this “idealized attention span.” I think I can keep going the same way I did without factoring in all the changes that happened in graduate school. We talk about becoming distracted but what is the difference between having an actual focusing problem and just reaching our attention span limits? Maybe we become too productive when we ignore our body’s way of saying take a break.

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I think we have this tendency to want to define things in terms of good and bad, positive and negative. It probably has something to do with all the compare and contrast assignments we had to do as a child. (You know, complete this venn diagram and compare the villain to the hero of the story.) We are so use to defining things by whether they are good or bad for us that we don’t know how to handle something that just is; it simply exists. It becomes a question of how we use this technology, which I think can make a few people uncomfortable because it puts the responsibility in their own hands and we don’t always know how to handle taking responsibility. So, when it comes to collaborating on something, we don’t know how to see it is a neutral ground that our behaviors towards and on this neutral ground defines whether it is good or bad, positive or negative.

I agree I found the Nicholas Carr’s article to be annoying, because it made too many assumptions and generalization about the Internet for me to agree with it. I think Carr assumes that individuals used to sit down and read a book word for word and it was wonderful and no one ever skimmed a book. It’s this revisionism of how everything used to be better, but how do we know for certain? Yes, when individuals only had a handful books they read, then yes, they probably read them cover to cover. However, the study he mentioned doesn’t in fact show that in the past we were any better. It only addresses what the individuals are doing now on the Internet and what individuals today are doing. I do wonder what are they defining as a short attention span. For example, the pathologist saying he couldn’t read War and Peace anymore. What did he mean? (That’s one of the longest novels and it’s Russian literature and it’s considered to be one of the greatest novels in literature. What is he expecting to be able to read all 1,000 pages in one sitting?) To me, it doesn’t make sense. You can’t compare reading an online article to reading Tolstoy. “Skimming material” isn’t a new concept. If anything, I think the Internet has made us more impatient, especially when it comes to ourselves.

You thought about how “it is such a shame that students are so busy that they can only “learn” material for a test” make me wonder about the pressure and time limits within education. We are so set on finishing our education within a certain time period. We have this attitude of getting in and out of school in some ways. I think it partly comes from the issue of how much higher education costs, which is a whole different debate. However, it also comes from the pressures based on how others have performed and the requirements the school places on learning. Do we need to slow down in order to avoid the pressure of the “bucket theory?”

I agree about not being certain about “completely [buying] into the complete destruction of our banking education for the complete replacement of problem-proposing education.” There are certain area of education that I’m not certain we can have open discussions on. For example, anatomy is a subject with a right answer. I’m not sure there is a better way to teach a subject that requires a fair amount of memorization. I think we need to understand the importance of balance in learning. We do need banking education for some areas. Ultimately, I don’t think Freire was considering some of the necessary areas that banking education can touch on, but we do need openness and understanding in education along. I don’t know if you can have critical thinking without learning the basics. We just need to learn how to balance passion and engaging students with foundational learning that sometimes can only come from banking education practices.

I remember in school my teacher used to say that if they could just open our brains and pour the knowledge in they would. It wasn’t about learning the knowledge or the material. I agree there is a lost of creativity when we forced this “procedure” on students. Banking education is dangerous at times. We turn off students to going further or truly understanding the potential of what education can be or mean for an individuals. I recently took a workshop for Budget Board at Virginia Tech and another student wanted to know if the material would be on a test. There was this expectation of just being able to repeat back the material instead of embracing the help the workshop offered. You make a good point about exposing students to research experience. Research can allow for students to have a form of creativity that maybe can help show how learning can embrace what you are interested in and help you beyond memorizing facts.

I like how you focused on discussing the dialogue in the classroom between students and teachers. I think it is critical to consider the how to learning is an “exchange between teachers and students.” There are some boundaries in education and learning that will always exist. There will be teachers and students in some form or capacity whether they are called students and teacher or masters and padawans. However, I think that the principles and concepts Freire makes ultimately come down to openness with education and the existing structures.

I agree that there are certain classes that feels like there is a pressure to discover what the teacher’s thoughts are and what the mass opinion in class is in order to be a part of the class and succeed. However, I think that sometimes there are classes in which the students are the oppressors as well as the teacher. It comes in the form of the attitude set by the class. If you disagree with something or learned a different point of view from the majority within the class, you can feel extremely uncomfortable with giving a different point of view. I think it is important to keep in mind why some students remain quiet. There are cases when students are quiet not because they are quiet individuals and then there are times when students are quiet because they are pressured into silence. I do wonder if sometimes this can happen to a teacher. Can a teacher become pressured into silence when they differ from the majority of the class?