Education


My Educational Philosophy

My educational philosophy centers around what is known as Constructivism. This is the belief that each person must build or construct a framework of knowledge based on what they already know prior to anything new being useful to them. Information is nothing more than useless symbols until it is processed and understood by a thinking mind. It also embraces the idea that how one thinks is more important than the mere accumulation and regurgitation of factual information. Thinking is a process which must be practiced through: hands-on demonstrations, scenarios, role-playing, simulations, team-learning, as well as more traditional methodology, until the mind becomes dynamic and flexible enough to handle any problem that might come along. It is more important to me to provide useful information and give students the skills they will be able to apply in real world situations instead of wasting our time on meaningless trivia which will be forgotten as soon as we finish a unit or take a test. I am also rather impressed with the work of Howard Gardner, although I am not so sure that he did not simply give us new words for old ideas in his Multiple-Intelligence theories.


More References on Constructivism



General Education Resources



Technology and Technology Education Resources


Math Anxiety

Now we come to a particularly important point in education (at least for me). I have math anxiety. It has caused me great difficulties in learning math beyond the basic steps and I have a very negative attitude towards math and math teachers in general (no offense, but it seems like I had a lot of bad math teachers). I decided that I would add a section on this page devoted to math and math anxiety in the hopes that math teachers would be able to better help those who suffer from math anxiety, and those sufferers can also find some help with their problem. So I dedicate this part of the page to math teachers and math anxiety sufferers wherever you are! ;-)


Critical Thinking


I hear the words critical thinking being tossed around a lot in the educational community and I just have one question: What is critical thinking? I'm not exactly sure, it seems to depend on who you ask and why. I have pondered this question for some time and discovered that I was critically thinking about critical thinking! (Kind of gets you all warm, fuzzy and metaphysical, doesn't it? see my philosophy page ). Anyway, I have come to the conclusion that critical thinking is a number of things all having something to do with logically approaching a problem and then discovering the various solutions available for that problem. This is because many problems in our world have multiple solutions that can be considered "right" and many that can be considered "wrong," and critical thinking attempts to address solutions to these kinds of problems. Of course I don't know that I'm any more right about this than you, so I'll just have to let you explore some links and find out for yourself! ;-)


Do you have a thought about critical thinking (or disagree with me about mine)? Please E-Mail me and we'll discuss it.

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