Social Well Being and Such

     I think we need to begin focusing on the social well being of our students. As much as we have been trained to teach content, we all have at least one teacher whose personality or active attention to us is what made us want to be teachers. Those people changed our lives by just bothering to care about us.

    That is what we need to focus on. Changing and improving the lives of our students. That will require some particular social growth in introverts like me, but it will be worth it. Especially as the rates of suicide and depression are increasing and social skills in general are decreasing. We need to know how to interact with one another, and the only way to do that is through practice. Google might be able to tell us a bunch of facts, but it will be a long time before it can carry a full conversation for us.

    I also think we will need to learn how to balance teaching content and skills. I don’t really agree that we need to stop teaching things like times tables, but I definitely agree that we need to do much much more to teach internet literacy and general skills. We definitely forget a large part of the content we learn through general education, but that’s often due to a lack of using it. It doesn’t mean we need to throw out learning facts.

    It’s true that we don't need to worry as much about content because students will be able to look up so much information with a piece of the internet more or less attached to them, but they still need to have enough background information in their heads in order to understand what the internet gives them. You can’t learn about algebra without knowing basic times tables, and you can’t know how genetics works if you don’t know what a cell is.