Toaster

The toaster post got me thinking about individualized education and differentiation in education. a quote from the post was:

"All the noise about individualized education is just adding some kind of sensors to the toaster to tell what kind of bread we’re dealing with and how the heat transfer works in the structure of the bread. It’s all a way of taking variable inputs and yielding uniform outputs."

Where I work we talk about differentiating education. We talk about meeting the individual needs of students. We talk about teaching to their level and bringing them to where they need to be. Ah ha. That is the point. We always have a place we want them to be. We always have what outcome we want in education. Funny thing is it is always the same. We want everyone to know 2+2=4 and the 9-11 attack was in 2001 not 2000. We expect everyone to learn the same thing so that their "outputs" are the same. We talk about them as individuals and how they are different, but we don't want different. We want them to conform to our view of what they should know. We rarely give students the chance to excel in an area. Sure some kids take Art 2 or Physics in high school, but that isn't what I mean. Kids are different and it should be okay for them to learn different things, in different ways, at different speeds, in different settings. Math class should be outside sometimes.

I challenge any teacher that has never taken their class outside to do it this year. I've done it (in public school not the prison). It works. I challenge art teachers to talk about ascetics and how some the same picture may look better to a person depending on the degrees used in the angles and how that relates to math. I challenge all teachers to collaborate together and stop working against one another. Math teachers use data analysis to let students analyze their own ratio of letter usage in their writing. It is interesting for students to see that they never hardly use the letters X, Q, and Z. Do students that use them more tend to do better in English class? Maybe it could be a collaborative project.

I'm sorry for ranting, but education is such a rigid process in America and teachers need to teach. We need to be outside the box sometimes and not just think out side of it.