Shor - Reflection

The article "Empowering Education" by Ira Shor talks how participation is important for student involvement because the traditional classrooms lack students being active participants in their own education.  It also discusses empowering classes in schools that help students develop skills and knowledge along with high expectations for their education, future and themselves as well. It helps them "to fight for a quality of life in which all human beings benefit." An important concept in the article is "Banking Education" which is basically that a good amount of educators just stand in front of the classroom and piled information about subjects that do not make them interested or invested in their own education.

Personal connections that I made to this text is that my whole education up until high school was banking education. I remember just sitting at a desk everyday day for hours in different subjects listening to the teachers drone on and on about topics that had nothing to do with me. I often remember thinking why was I forced to learn things that wouldn't help me later in life? In 7th grade social studies class, we had to examine and study maps and then recreate it by ourselves. How did remembering continents ans states help me further myself in life? All it did was help me memorize information for the quizzes that we had but the information from it seems useless otherwise.

As a future teacher, I don't want to force my kids to listen talk for hours about information that they won't need later in life but encourage them to about themselves and, their future and their education by constantly thinking of different ways have them participate actively in their own education. I'm going to make it one of my goals to be the kind of teacher that empowers her students to learn and engage rather than drain them of their curiosity and social instincts. It's really our job as future teachers to help teach and guide our children into becoming great citizens that think and question the world and society they live in rather than robots that do what they are told too without questioning it.