"I entered the classrooms with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer" (Hooks 254). Most students go to school because they have to learn, but most of the time they are not learning, instead they are being taught or spoon fed information to remember. Students are constantly having information thrown at their face so they can take that big test and as soon as that test is over with the information gets thrown out of the window instead of learning it. Day after day, they are being told to memorize a book or a PowerPoint instead of learning what the material is. Although some classes do use paper and project approaches, most classes do not. Doing a paper or a project
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As a high school and college student, English is the only class where I have struggled and had to figure everything out. About the eighth week in college English I was told to write a rhetorical essay, that is something I never heard of and I had to figure out what it was and use the resources around me. The best thing about that is that I learned exactly what it was without being told exactly what to do. In every other class the teachers have always spoon fed the information to me, I remembered it for the test and then I threw it away. According to Paulo Freire, the director of Education at SESI, “Four times four is sixteen...The student records, memorizes and repeats….without perceiving what four times four really means…” (Freire 1). This proves that not only are students are memorizing the material that they are being taught, but that they are not thinking about what they are writing which makes it impossible to learn the material. Freire used the banking concept, which is a metaphor to describe how in traditional education the teacher and students do not connect. For example, a teacher may put a PowerPoint on the board everyday and the students copy it, do their homework, memorize it and take a test. There is not questions being asked or engagement in the material. Instead of that Freire took a different approach on learning, he think that a teacher should put something more complex on the board such as a quote and make the students think about what it means (Freire 10). His appraoch is better because students are required to think about and learn what is on the board rather than him making them memorize material. Barry Alford, an english professor at Mid Michigan Community College, had a similar idea he states “We are constantly confronted with evidence that the rhetorical choices we teach our students to use do not necessarily encourage them to think” (Alford 280).
As a high school and college student, English is the only class where I have struggled and had to figure everything out. About the eighth week in college English I was told to write a rhetorical essay, that is something I never heard of and I had to figure out what it was and use the resources around me. The best thing about that is that I learned exactly what it was without being told exactly what to do. In every other class the teachers have always spoon fed the information to me, I remembered it for the test and then I threw it away. According to Paulo Freire, the director of Education at SESI, “Four times four is sixteen...The student records, memorizes and repeats….without perceiving what four times four really means…” (Freire 1). This proves that not only are students are memorizing the material that they are being taught, but that they are not thinking about what they are writing which makes it impossible to learn the material. Freire used the banking concept, which is a metaphor to describe how in traditional education the teacher and students do not connect. For example, a teacher may put a PowerPoint on the board everyday and the students copy it, do their homework, memorize it and take a test. There is not questions being asked or engagement in the material. Instead of that Freire took a different approach on learning, he think that a teacher should put something more complex on the board such as a quote and make the students think about what it means (Freire 10). His appraoch is better because students are required to think about and learn what is on the board rather than him making them memorize material. Barry Alford, an english professor at Mid Michigan Community College, had a similar idea he states “We are constantly confronted with evidence that the rhetorical choices we teach our students to use do not necessarily encourage them to think” (Alford 280).