Teaching Style Comparison

Movie Teacher Style Comparison

I chose to watch Stand and Deliver and To Sir, With Love in my comparison of the teaching styles of two movie teachers. Both movies portray teachers that work with underprivileged student populations. Stand and Deliver is based on the true story of East Los Angeles teacher, Jaime Escalante. To Sir, With Love stars Sidney Poitier as Mr. Thackeray, an engineer-turned-teacher working in a lower class London high school.

Although both Escalante and Thackeray both deal with underprivileged students who socially sit outside the mainstream of society’s concerns, I feel the similarities end there. Escalante comes to his student population as a part of their own culture. Thackeray is from British Guiana and comes to his class in London via the United States. Thackeray’s teaching style is very authoritarian. He tells his students in one class, “I teach you truths, my truths.” He throws his textbooks in the garbage can and decides that what will serve his students best is to learn about life, about how to be an adult. He teaches them about cooking, takes them to the museum, and talks to them about what it is to be a real man. I wondered what he’d say to the girls about being a real woman. In his classroom, his voice is the only one that is correct.

Escalante’s teaching style is much more egalitarian. Although he does hold himself up as an authority figure, his attitude toward his students is as a guide and mentor. He does just the opposite of Thackeray; he gets out the heavy-duty math books! He feels that for students to succeed in life they must know more than just how to live. Most of his students are already more mature and carry more responsibility that they should. What he feels they need from him is a chance to get an education and more than a dead-end job. Escalante does not hold himself up as the highest authority; he puts his subject matter and his teaching before his own authority. He’s a strong enough figure that in one scene, he chastises his students for getting the wrong answer when he, himself is the one who is wrong.

Of the two teachers, I think that Escalante’s teaching style is the better one. Of course, I say this because Thackeray’s experience is purely fictional and it would be unheard of in today’s society for a teacher of seniors in high school to throw out the books in order to teach students how to make a salad. Escalante’s style and dedication are an inspiration and show how a teacher’s attitude toward the importance of learning and education can positively affect his or her students.

Does Technology Change the Way We Teach?

People nowadays think of technology as electronic, computerized and web-based - but it hasn't always been defined in this way. Once upon a time, pencils and pens were new technology. Now those things seem to have always been around. But just as the electronic age is changing the way we do things, all new technology forces change in the areas of lives of the people it touches.

Considering that technology changes the way we live, it has and will continue to change the way we teach. The bigger questions should involve how it will change the way we teach. There are so many different aspects of technology that teachers and students use on a regular basis. There are also aspects of technology that have yet to be incorporated into our daily pedagogical practices. I hope to be a part of a new way of teaching that incorporates technology and utilizes it to its fullest potential to provide the highest level of academic success for our students.

Web 2.0 Tools

There are so many cool web 2.0 tools out there. It was hard to pick just one that I wanted to take a better look at, but in the end, I worried that the tool became more important than the lesson - or that it lacked the sufficient rigor needed for high school classes. Early on, when our class looked at web 2.0, we covered the big names, Twitter, YouTube, etc. It was then that I thought of a lesson using YouTube. I liked that the tool itself is only the vehicle and that its use is something that is hip and cool for today's students. My lesson focuses on using a text, more specifically one that is meant to be presented dramatically - a play or poem - Shakespeare immediately comes to mind. As a student, I found it difficult to get into just reading Shakespeare's works. It simply wasn't enough to get a strong hold of the material. My idea is to have students, alone or in groups, work to bring to life a scene, character or a plot summary of a Shakespearean work in video and post it to YouTube. I even tried it out myself and enlisted the help of my children and a few of their friends to create a very brief overview of Romeo and Juliet.

Originally I thought that I could use a lesson like this with the reading comprehension strategies GLI but as I went through the exercise myself, I found that issues of comprehension were in the background and I was more concerned with characterization and presentation. There was another GLI regarding those goals that made better sense, and this lesson gives the coverage of this material more life than simply reading it.

For those of you who think, "I'll never get permission to use YouTube with my students," there is a viable alternative - TeacherTube. It may be less popular and lesser known that YouTube, but it is very similar web 2.0 tool dedicated strictly to videos that have some kind of academic pursuit and it would easily calm the worst YouTube critics.

Here's a link to the video I made for this project. Enjoy!

Romeo & Juliet - Slightly Abridged

The Value in Learning from Fiction

Of course there is value in learning from fiction! How else can one visit unreachable places, experience the events of the distant and not-too-distant past, get to know a variety of personalities, all while learning about the universal themes of humanity?

Fiction provides a window into a larger world - one that we might never experience without the aid of a good book. Dipping into this larger world allow us to walk in the shoes of a million different characters and gives us a larger perspective about ourselves, our lives, the people we know, and the world outside our own personal experience.

I can't imagine a world without fiction. Human beings used it since before anyone can remember so that we can convey to each other how to live our lives, respond to our environment and deal with the knowable and the unknown.