Making it Personal and Change for Students in the Future

I agree with the article, "Education: The Case for Making it Personal" in the education journal Educational Leadership. Standardization has destroyed the personal connection between teachers and students in schools. It has also hindered real learning and replaced it with meaningless memorization. However, i don't think the article helps us too much. I feel at least here at the school of education at New Paltz that too much standardization is bad. I'm sure many educators would agree. The people who need convincing are parents and politicians and other non-education people. Without their support we will only have more articles like these that show a few diamond in the rough examples rather than making any real progress. If we want real change in schools we need to get out of our scholarly field bubble and reach real people about what we want to change in schools. Until then, this is only a dream.

The second article, "A Habitat for 21st Century Learning," kind of goes against the idea of personalization. I had a hard time relating to it for two reasons. First it centers around public schools in Illinois. If we want to personalize education each state with its own group of different cultures and systems, reading about Illinois and their problems does not help me as a New York teacher as much. They talk about making completely new buildings with every aspect to teaching in mind in the architecture and construction. They may have big open fields in Illinois to build on, but we have very little space here in New York. Although I enjoy the idea of making schools more community oriented I cannot relate to this idea very well either. My home town on Long Island is devoid of most culture and community. What do we do with a place that lacks community? See what I mean by we need to be more personalized in education. This article comes off as slightly ethnocentric to the situation the author is in. I would have liked the article to acknowledge that every school district faces a different set of problems when changing for the future.

My own classroom

In my fantasy, my classroom would mainly be decorated by books. I would want it to look almost like a library. The books would look big and old and give the students a sense of awe and wonder about our deep and rich literary history.

Practically and from a tech standpoint, I would want to be able to have a laptop that could plug into a projection system and internet that it could also plug into. The internet is a great quick reference guide for teachers and students. When a student asks a question I don't know, we can find out together on the internet where I will have the opportunity to model how to find reliable sources and information on the internet.