paulo freire

This article is my high school!  I am the student that was taught by this teacher!  I always had teachers that taught students like they were getting shot at with a dart gun; sometimes the dart sticks and sometimes it doesn't.  And really after hit by the dart gun all I knew is that I was hit and didn't know why.  I left classes able to memorize facts that were needed for the test, and if that was all we needed to know I didn't see a reason to learn anything else.  Things don't change in college level classes either.  Anyone who has taken a class in the EWU history dept. can tell you that the professors know everything there is to know and students are hardly able to spell their names.  The saddest part about this style is that there is no creativity and we don't learn from each other from discussions.  A teacher may have read 4 books on Serbia but there could be a student in a class that grew up in Serbia and could add to the classes knowledge of the wars that were going on there.  I don’t think that student’s learn best in this way.  They aren’t fully emerged in the information and digesting it.  Instead it is just going in one ear and out the other ear right after the test.  I have taken plenty of History classes that I have left and remember nothing from.  It would help to get the information in lecture form and do something with the material.  Not only would you be hearing it, but also using it to “build” something else.  That way you are using the information in several ways and the information has several chances to stick in your head for more than a quarter.