Knowledge is Infinite

I thought it appropriate to end my blogging for this quarter with a positive post. It seems like there are so many obstacles and challenges  to becoming a good teacher but Ayer's chapter on liberating the curriculum reminded me of why I wanted to teach.  I am glad that I am more aware of these challenges for when I go into the classroom next fall, but at the same time I still need to remeber all the good things about teaching as well. I love how Ayers points out that knowledge is infinite. We can never know everything about everything. Even if we study and learn our whole entire lives we will never come close to knowing everything. What an awesome and humbling concept! This gives us endless possibilities for educational opportunities, not only for our students, but for ourselves as well.

So how do we decide what to teach? Knowledge may be infinite, but our students have to learn something. They have to be prepared to go out into the real world after their education is complete, so we need to determine what is the “important” knowledge and teach those things to our students. Right? Yes and no. I think we can all agree that the basic subjects that we teach are important and necessary; however, how we teach can and should be always changing. We can teach to a textbook and worksheets and tests. We can give examples of problems that most students will not be able to relate to in real life and force them to learn facts and figures we deem to be important. Or, we can let our students decide for themselves what they find most important, and let them pursue those things through classroom activities and projects that we guide. To some, this may seem a scary concept. For me it is exciting! It means that my classroom will never be the same from year to year and I will get to learn new things right alongside my students.