Reflection paper 3

What we know, and what they want you to know.

During elementary and secondary education, you are either born prejudice or adapt to the difference of society. Luckily you don’t know the difference until you reach high school. In elementary I realized that the competiveness came out in both girls and boys. Sure when it came to lunch “Woman were from Venus and Men were from Mars” just like 1+1=2 the equation was as simple as that. The competitive side usually stopped when we got out of math or spelling bees. Even when it came to physical education we had competition. We had a girl name Victoria E; she was the fastest runner in PSN. The second best was a boy named Stephan R, can you believe that! With all that physical strength and competitiveness a girl beat a guy? I guess we can’t take all of the credit; she later became involved in cross country and was naturally a runner by birth. Even though it’s one of those rare cases, boys are usually better at physical and competitive sports and activities. Now when music or art came along, I never heard a boy say I can sing better or higher than you can. Or I can drawl a perfect circle better than you can. The boy’s stuck to their elements as well as the girls stuck to their creativeness. No lines crossed, no questions asked. My experience with my teachers learning style was more on the transformation approach. We learned our multiplication by sitting down in a group and memorizing a song in a rhyme, exactly how it was 3x3 is 9 3x4 is 12. Of course it sounded more sync and cool back when I was 8. I realized female teachers have a more social and expressive way in teaching the class rather than males. My 5th grade teachers made us memorize our time tables, every Friday we had a sheet of paper handed to us, and only had a minute to complete as much as we could from 1 through 12 at what ever number you were on. If you could finish all of them and correctly you would move on to the next level, for example instead of being on your ones time table you advanced on to twos. This killed me, I couldn’t think everything so crammed in and rushed. I knew my multiplication, but when I was put under pressure, I cracked. If I were to go back in time I would have my teachers use the social action approach. Some kids don’t know the basic of being a kid, their parent’s pressure then straight into intelligence and learning that they skip their childhood, which could emotionally affect them in the long run. Not every student will learn how you teach on what they’ve learn. But they will learn what they know on how you teach.