As a graduation requirement, I had the privilege of designing a forty-hour experiential learning project. I decided the best setting for my growth as a future educator would be in the college's tutoring center. Below is a journal entry documenting what I learned from this valuable journey.
There is this student who comes into the center quite often for help in college algebra. We’ll call him V for the sake of this journal entry. V is foreign, though I’ve forgotten where he said he was from. Whenever I help him, I’ve noticed that he seems almost perpetually distracted. He will vaguely tell you which problem he is struggling with, and then gaze off into nothing while you try to explain it to him. It may be ADHD, or some other learning disability that he struggles with, but from my experience with him, he seems like the kind of student who comes into the tutoring center hoping the tutors will do his work for him. You can always differentiate between the students there to learn and the students there to get answers. The former type of student will ask questions as you help them solve the problem, and will often not even enter the answer into the computer until they have solved the problem again for themselves and understand how they arrived at the answer. The later kind will just watch as you explain how to arrive at the solution, enter it immediately into the computer, often without writing anything down, and then dismiss you as soon as the system has told them it’s right. My experience in the tutoring center has reaffirmed how important “doing” is to learning. Whoever is doing the most work in the learning experience is who is also learning the most. This is why it’s so important for teachers to design experiences for students in which they can be actively engaged. They must being ‘doing’ more than the teacher ‘does’, or the teacher will be learning a lot, and the students will be learning nothing.
September 11, 2018
There is this student who comes into the center quite often for help in college algebra. We’ll call him V for the sake of this journal entry. V is foreign, though I’ve forgotten where he said he was from. Whenever I help him, I’ve noticed that he seems almost perpetually distracted. He will vaguely tell you which problem he is struggling with, and then gaze off into nothing while you try to explain it to him. It may be ADHD, or some other learning disability that he struggles with, but from my experience with him, he seems like the kind of student who comes into the tutoring center hoping the tutors will do his work for him. You can always differentiate between the students there to learn and the students there to get answers. The former type of student will ask questions as you help them solve the problem, and will often not even enter the answer into the computer until they have solved the problem again for themselves and understand how they arrived at the answer. The later kind will just watch as you explain how to arrive at the solution, enter it immediately into the computer, often without writing anything down, and then dismiss you as soon as the system has told them it’s right. My experience in the tutoring center has reaffirmed how important “doing” is to learning. Whoever is doing the most work in the learning experience is who is also learning the most. This is why it’s so important for teachers to design experiences for students in which they can be actively engaged. They must being ‘doing’ more than the teacher ‘does’, or the teacher will be learning a lot, and the students will be learning nothing.
Comments
Post a Comment