...continued Postville Blog

This is an extention on my thoughts about Postville. If you were a teacher in Postville how would you deal with the challenges of first, communicating with your students who are Spanish speakers, and second how would you go about real world applications for students whose heritage and culture are so dissimilar? This is where Ed. Psych. comes in. By involving the community and understanding what it is that a certain culture knows you will see more success in your students. We as teacher are not put into a classroom to tell children about what we know, we are there to guide them on their path to knowing more about themselves and to show them the best ways to understanding new information and aquiring a better understanding of "why things are the way they are". I believe that my students are going to teach me more in my first years than I could teach them. What a beautiful thing to look forward to, teaching is much more than classroom control, meeting standards, and learning new facts. That will be the greatest challenge, and also the reason that being a teacher is truly the greatest profession, is our ability to balance what is important to us as teachers, with what is important for each individual child and what the government has deemed important. A system that is continuously restricting a teachers ability to run the classroom the way he or she wants to is the kind of system that a truly great teacher can manipulate. Sort of a meeting standards collides with real world applications and genuine inquisitiveness about the world in which we exist.