The pedagogical is personal

Yes, I'm aware that I have sucked as a blogger this month. I think I know why - I just haven't been excited enough by something to blog about it, except for the Red Sox, but that's all said and done now. So what does that leave? Nothing much, if you've been following along this month. But I'm back in the swing of things after having read a piece on pedagogy, and the discussions that professors and students should be having. It was written wonderfully by a person who saw all of the excitement in classrooms as she was a young student, and then saw it all fade in her undergraduate studies. She believes that this is because the emphasis was on this educational bank, a notion that information is only good if we can spit it out at a later place and time. She also considers this educational bank to be useless, which is something that I agree with. I've been under the belief for a while now that one of the coolest things we can do is to learn about ourselves, and I believe that it's important for us to bring our entire self into classrooms. We can't enter a class or a conversation only expecting to learn information to store for later use. When we really set out to engage with the material (as students) and to make this information personally relevant, the learning becomes much more effective and useful. Bring yourself fully into a classroom and you will leave with a better sense of yourself, a higher self-actualization. Go into it only expecting knowledge and information, and you're selling yourself short.

So that's the idea. I feel as though I should have written more about this, but maybe I'm getting good at saying things concisely. That'd be nice.

Here's the song I was listening to as I read this great piece. It's a good song, and I hope you think so too.