Journal #14 - Teaching Stategies

It’s really interesting but when I look back on what I’ve actually been able to learn throughout my college and my high school experience, I feel like I haven’t learned very much in terms of the actual content taught in the classrooms. Most times, I was just forced to sit in my seat and listen to the teacher speak. Then all the material would leave my mind as soon as I finished my tests. It’s the same even now with all my lectures. I realized, I don’t remember crap unless I have to. And I really believe this is what John Dewey and Burkhardt was speaking about. It doesn’t make sense to force students to sit quietly and absorb the materials that teachers teach. Furthermore, much of the material we learn do not have real life applications. It does not make sense to us because we cannot understand how it relates to our own personal experiences.

However, the few times that I really enjoyed learning was with teachers that had interesting teaching strategies. For instance, one of my teachers taught in a very Socratic way. He always asked us to analyze U.S. history and the way it has been written. He also made us question how history relates to us nowadays. These lessons definitely influenced me in so many ways. Its probably the reason why I started loving history and why I would love to teach it later in life.

Furthermore, currently I teach history and poetry to high school students at Berkeley Technology Academy. Throughout all of our lessons, we break it down into three parts: We broke it down into 3 parts: a historical event, a current issue, and an activity. For example, during our lesson on imperialism we decided to focus our topic on the theme of home. We decided to teach about one, how Native Americans are constantly being pushed out throughout history, second, gentrification nowadays in their own community, and lastly, a poem about home. By doing this, we were able to teach history lessons that made sense to the students. Furthermore, the activity was an outlet for them to connect to the material, to express how they feel about the topic, and a method of assessing the students’ maturity on the topic. Through this experience, I realized that there was a possibility of teaching students in more effective and practical ways.