Learning is living...
“Teaching today is being a step ahead and creating that
world where exchange of information is gratifying and
imagination is rewarded...”
Learning and Teaching
May 28th, 2011
Learning for me is the exercise that we as hu-
man beings achieve after reflecting on experi-
ences, that are either of meaningful, academic,
spiritual, emotional, or physical nature. We
choose to take steps in the world and each one
of those events teaches us something about
ourselves, about others, about the world that
surrounds us or about the complexity and un-
certainty of life. Every decision we make car-
ries a consequence that either positive or nega-
tive will provide us with a discovery of the
world around us.
Answer A or B, go to school or not, to study or
to play, to go out with this man or not; these
are examples of choices that are presented to
us in the everyday interactions with our sur-
roundings and whether we go with one deci-
sion or the other in many cases is influenced by
the previous knowledge we have, prior experi-
ences, that have taught us about the outcomes.
How does this apply to academic learning?
Easy, you can tell a student do not run in the
hall because you will fall, but unless that stu-
dent has seen it himself or experienced it him-
self, he/she will never grasp the meaning of
what your intentions, nor message is. No one
learns living through someone else’s eyes, the
process of reflexion must exist in order to be
meaningful learning.
Learning these days must be a series of experi-
ences, the school must change from threaten-
ing students to leading them to the right oc-
currences so that they themselves find the
meaning and significance in every event in
their school’s curriculum. Teaching students to
repeat a series of events, dates and random in-
formation has proven to be deficient in the
past, but provides us with enough experience
to reflect from it for the future.
Being a teacher and teaching is no longer what
it was to the old school, it has evolved to guid-
ance, leadership; the teacher has become and
observer that draws the path but watches their
students reach to conclusions, to solutions, and
to deductions. Teachers nowadays must be
open, kind, strict, creative, researchers and
dreamers; to teach your students to find their
own answers you yourself as the authority must
be able to find it, to be a constant pirate in the
hunt for knowledge, therefore by example you
can motivate and request the same from your
students.
Students these days have different needs, less
attention spam and more information available
to them. How can we as teachers provide
them with something they can learn them-
selves on the internet? Simple, we provide an
experience which they can not obtain any-
where else. In other words, teaching today is
being a step ahead and creating that world
where exchange of information is gratifying
and imagination is rewarded.