Summary Post C4T Teacher #2

My Teacher was Ms. Paul White, and her blog was a series of posts entitled "Reflections of the TZSTeacher." In her first blog post I commented on, she wrote about tension arising because of the state writing test being adminstered and completed through the computer alone, which is to come into affect in early March. She expressed hers as well as other teachers' concerns about it, some of which were questions like "should spellcheck be available to students?" and also "should students be able to use such things as 'bold' 'italics' etc?" I my response I answered 'no' to the first question. I expressed my opinion that an online writing test is fine, but only if it is exactly like that of a hardcopy form of the test. Therefore, students shouldn't be able to use spellcheck because, especially with a writing test, they should already know correct spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc. Likewise, I answered 'yes' to the second question because in an ordinary hardcopy test students are permitted to use italics and other things similar to it.

In the second blog post I commented on by Ms. White, she wrote of how students have said that they don't want to simply fill in the blanks on a test or assignment. They actually want to think. She responded by saying that we as teachers should want and aim for students being passionate about learning. She then inserted a list of exceedingly thought-provoking questions, none of which could be answered at a glance and all of which required decent research to some extent. Some of these questions were "Why ISN’T Pluto a planet any longer? How can it be a planet one day and not the next? Who decided it wasn’t?" and "When is a fact a fact?"
In my response I told her of 'burp-back' education (I'm beginning to say that often, now), and how we as teachers need to not, with our questions, make our students simply recite what we just said. We need to provoke them with thoughts, and perhaps if we did this students wouldn't get so bored with school as much. They would begin to possibly enjoy it.


And I know this is supposed to be a summary, but for any of you interested, I wanted to copy and paste my somewhat lengthy response to Ms. White's post.

Hello Ms. White!

My name is Matthew Poirier and I am a student in Dr. Strange’s EDM310 class. My immediate reaction to those questions of yours was “boy, time to do some research…” which is exactly what should be the response to questions in schools nowadays. The answer shouldn't be readily available, listed somewhere in plain english for everyone to just repeat. Thought provocation is what responses should be to questions. In Dr. Strange’s class, he speaks of what is called ‘burp back’ education, which is essentially feeding your students information and having them offer it back -’burp’- in an exam, test, etc. What? What is that? Definitely not leraning. It’s recitation. It’s similar to when a student comes up with an ingenious idea, then another student raises his hand and says “yeah, um, like what he was saying, bla bla bla…” Everyone thinks “Hey buddy, you’re just repeating what the smart guy said in your own words. Close your mouth and put your hand down.” Students need to make other students think. Need to make TEACHERS think. Yes, I said it. I’ll bet any teacher in the world has his/her day made when a student says something and the teacher, after being stumped for a moment, goes “hey wait a minute… that’s excellent! Why didn’t I think of that?!” Why didn’t I think of that. It’s a question we want to hear often, and especially after we’ve said something. No more burp-backing! Let’s get some real learning out there.

Forgive me if my 'summary' seems long-winded... I just got excited about this topic.