Hi... |
Fun Fact |
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| My name is Matt Elm. I am a grad student enrolled in the Evergreen State College's Masters in Teaching program, pursuing a Middle School Humanities teaching endorsement. I'm looking forward to teaching Language Arts and Social Studies in a middle school setting. |
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Why Middle-Schoolers... |
On Education and Authority... |
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| My favorite group of people to work with is middle-schoolers, around 11 to 14 or 15. They still have a youthful exuberance, a zest for life, they are still able to find awe and wonder, the system has not yet bereft them of their idealism. But, they are going through tough times. They oftentimes need a fellow human being more than they need a teacher. This is the age when they first start to look at adults not as foreign entities, but as something they will one day become. | The
primary value of real education is to learn to 'see' and think so
clearly that the student becomes independent of authority, no longer
requiring leaders to tell him/her what he/she should think regarding
the crucial issues in life. But in order to arrive at this state
independent of authority, one must develop one's critical faculty
enormously, so that one possesses clarity of thought, sensitivity to
context and circumstances, ability to reason and argue with extreme
precision, considerable knowledge of relevant issues, and probably
above all, the ability to separate oneself from one's emotional need to
see oneself and the world in ways favorable to one's desired,
comfortable, or preferred way of viewing it. -- Dr. Lee Carter |