Student and Teaching Directed Inquiry, Drill and Kill

I believe I will use student directed inquiry the most in my classroom. I feel like more teachers are moving away from teacher-directed inquiry and moving towards student-directed model. Instead of “giving” students knowledge, student centered inquiry provides students some of the tools or language they might need in order to discover their own knowledge. With student-centered inquiry, I would have students first start off with their prior knowledge of a topic, and then investigate by learning from each other and researching on the Internet or library on a topic I give them.

Since I ideally would like to be a third-grade teacher and I would definitely use the drill and kill method with students learning their multiplication tables and possibly use different software that has this method of learning in it. I am not a fan of drill and kill in other areas of learning, for it becomes repetitive and boring, but as far as math goes, there needs to be some form of drill and kill, but students need to understand the math, not just memorize it.

Teenagers and the Role that Media Plays in their Lives

Technology plays a major role in teenager’s lives. I was surprised to see the results of the key findings. The fact that they can spend 8 ½ hours a day using media while multitasking is a surprising statistic to find out. This pretty much shows that they probably use phones, I-Pods, and Internet surf while they are at school. I think that schools should not allow students to carry I-pods and cell phones during class time. I have observed at many schools where they allow students to listen to I-Pods during their downtime or study hall. Instead, students can be taking part in extracurricular work or studying for a test, even reading a book!

I was also surprised to find out that the time spent in each sector of the media has increased tremendously in the past ten years. However, the only sector of media that has not increased usage per day is reading. Time spent reading went from 43 to 38 minutes per day. Now that magazines, newspapers, and journals are online, everything is right at their fingertips. Teachers should assign students for each subject either a book or an article to read and present it to class, at least once a month. Also, there should be more silent reading that goes on during free time. Students need more exposure to reading in order to gain more knowledge in their life.

Furthermore, just as teachers need to make students read more, the same goes for the parents. It was reported that children whose parents made an effort to limit media in their children’s time had less exposure to media. Furthermore, it was also shown in the findings that students that had less exposure to the media had better grades and were more content. As a result, teachers and parents should make a combined effort to limit media that the students use. Technology can be used in the classroom, administered by the teacher, but it should always be educationally related.