My Philosophy of Education

My educational philosophy is progressivism. This philosophy is defined as a more student centered philosophy than others. In this philosophy the students are considered the center of the classroom and the teacher is there just to guide the students who take their own path. Students should be the main focus after all students are what the schools are about they need to have individual time and also they need to have times to work and be socially interactive. Teachers have certain responsibilities to teach the children that are in the class. Teaching something is different from just memorizing something, repeating it on the test and forgetting it. They should learn it well enough to relate it to their lives and not just take a test and simply forget it. They need to be able to retain the information from year to year and not just for a couple of weeks.  It is also important for children to learn to be socially interactive with the people around them, after all this is something that they are going to have to do for the rest of their lives. I believe that children in school should be taught how to use the things that they learn to benefit them in an everyday world and not just how to recite something back that they learned. A lot of times children learn things that they take a test on and then they do not remember a single thing the next week but if the same topic was related to their real life experiences in some way then they will be more likely to remember it years down the road. This is why that me as a future teacher should teach things in a way that they can use it in their everyday lives. For example if I am teaching a Math lesson to my class I would teach it by using a word problem that gives a scenario of a person buying something and ask the kids how much will be left or how much more do they need and not just sit a worksheet with problems for them to do not having anything to do with real life.  In a progressivism classroom their would be a lot of group work going on in the classroom the children will not just sit in desks all day and do work they will get up and work in groups to become more socially healthy and at the same time they will be helping their intellectual health. I have been in classes that teach using real life and classes that just give notes and take a test I can say that I did much better in the class that gave the life experiences and a lot of those things I still remember to this day and that is one of the things that I as a teacher am going to be responsible for is the students learning. Giving a test and everyone making a hundred is not learning it is just repeating information. I think that if I can just teach one child something then that will be something that I will be very proud of. This is the reason that I want to be a teacher it gives me a chance to really make a positive impact on the children that I will be working with. They are like sponges and you can try to teach them to be people that are going to go to be respectable adults. I one day dream of being like some of my teachers in the past that I had, I hope that I can be like some of them some day. Each child is unique in appearance and in culture and they all are going to have different educational needs some of them may be similar but no two children are going to be the same. I can already see this in my field experiences. I am ready to embrace different cultures and hope that I can someday come to fully understand a lot of the cultures that are present in Georgia and in the United States today by working with the children in my class. I plan on decorating the classroom in ways that will support all cultures of the children in the class. Also maybe the kids that participate in different things like Hanukah and Kwanza and others would be willing to share with me some of the traditions that they have.  I plan to be culturally sensitive to my class because I realize that there will become may be going to be going on to be doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses or maybe they are going to be a carpenter or maybe even work in a business environment. Education should not just teach children the basic facts like History, Science, Math and English they should be taught to be civilized people in society.