C4T Teacher #2

For these assignments I was assigned to the teachers Jarrod Lamshed, William Chamberlain, et. al. and their blog At The Teachers Desk. For my first comment, I commented on a post that was published August 27, 2010 entitled Student Learning Manifesto. This post was about getting his students to create a learning manifesto. He wants the students to consider 3 or 4 positive actions that thay can use to become a bettwe student. He included a video of Kiley, a student, in which she discusses her learning manifesto. One of the things she included in her manifesto was to use what she learns in school in every day life. On this post I commented that I think the Student Manifesto is a really good idea to get students involved in their learning. I think it is very important for students to learn at a young age that goals are important. They should create both challenging and realistic goals. By getting the students to come up with their own, it allows them to evaluate their own performance and figure out what areas need improving. When I become a teacher one day, I plan on trying to get students involved in as much hands on learning as possible because I think that the more kids actually do with the material, the more information they retain about it.  The second post I commented on was posted on September 30, 2010. In this post, a role as a team teacher of a math course is being discussed. One quote that really stood out to me was "Students are expected me to be able to help them identify why they don't 'get' something. How can this great professional development for me if I am not comfortable?" He talks about how he has become a student again, having to relearn this material with the students as they learn it. He feels that he is in over his head on this project because he feels uncomfortable since he does not understand the material fully either. However, through his team teaching he is learning both math and how to be a better teacher. For this post I commented that I thought what he was doing was really great and sometimes it is difficult to do things we are not absolutely 100% comfortable doing. Often times it is the ones we are most unsure of ourselves that we learn the greatest amount of information. It is inspiring to see someone so willing to discuss their self doubts and to over come those doubts as well.