Tying it all together

It was super interesting to learn about connectivism. This theory has me thinking about how we as teachers can make learning stick with our students. It has been refreshing that our classes have stressed that education is going away from short term education that emphasizes regurgitation. Instead, we are trying to find ways that students can learn applicable content to many other areas and helping students connect that information with other classes and other areas of their lives. I would have loved more of this type of teaching while I was in school. I wish I would have been able to make more bridges in my brain between different content areas that would have helped me learn.

As I reflect on my college career, I think that there is still a need for memorization. The idea of memorization based education has been bashed on and I would like to defend it. Being able to store away information in my head was important for things like memorizing diagrams of veins, muscles, and bones in our body. It is not good enough for a PE teacher to have to look up diagrams of the body when a student has arm pain and wants to know if they can do a certain action. It should be imbedded information for a teacher to understand what muscles are in the body and what they do. The same principle is true for English. Students should still memorize what certain words mean so that they can pull out that definition when someone uses the word in a sentence.

As you can see, memorization should still be utilized in a classroom. It must be coupled with applications of what they are memorizing so that the definition sticks with the student. I believe this will improve motivation for students to learn the important information that we are teaching them.