Experience the World

Beyond Tolerance: Teaching English in a Post-9/11 Classroom

        Raquel Cook is one outstanding teacher. She was able to use her experiences and discomforts to develop discussion. I would love to teach a world literature class just as she did. Her use of decoration and photos helped capture her students' interests. I liked how her curriculum was based on "visiting" different partsof the world. I think her lesson on the Tiananmen Square massacre really hit home. The students were really impacted by Cook's activity when asking them to look at photos from the massacre. The response of anger she received from her students really showed how much emotion they felt towards the media. I was very happy when I read this part of the article because I believe Cook is right that the media does shield our eyes from the "other side of the story" in many tragedies. I think when students start asking questions about a concept or unit that is when they are really curious and even what to challenge the idea. I believe this lesson was very effective.
       Secondly, I liked her Cook related the ideas of religion in Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and culture as we view it today. I think when students are able to be honest with themselves what prejudices they feel today this gives them understanding of how to understand how people felt about issues in the past.
        I think I may use Cook's idea of excluding the word tolerance from my classroom as well. Like her, I would like to "encourage, instead, curiosity and inclusion" (22).

A Lesson from the Holocaust: From Bystander to Advocate in the Classroom

       When I read about "students who prefer to remain uninvolved in class" and follow "instructions, but never [show] passion or curiosity" I almost felt ashamed (84). I identified myself as a shy student. This does not mean though because I was not involved I did not care about the material. I wanted to do well and did everything my teacher asked me to do. I will admit sometimes I did not talk with my teachers after class. This is because I understood the instruction and did not need any further help. Should I have challenged myself even more by asking questions? I thought I already knew what was expected of me. I received good grades in high school, but after reading this passage I believe I was not critically thinking.  I believe maybe there was "smoke in front of my mirror of learning" (85) and this may be why I was not absorbing as much as I should have. I was able to receive good grades, but sometimes was not able to connect emotional with the assignments I was completing. This is one aspect that Karen A. Wink wanted to change about her teaching style. Her trip into the Holocaust gave her a "new understanding of apathy" (85). I liked her she shared her personal journal with her class about how she felt when she visited the prison. It made her class feel a little uneasy when she exposed to her raw emotions, but this helped her students direct "more feeling in their creative writing assignment" towards the end of the semester (87).

My Intuition

  I believe that through experiences we are able to identify with many more people around us. I am looking into an internship in China to learn new things not only about myself, but about another culture that I am not familiar with. The internship is Teach English in China. I applied for it because I want to gain experience as a teacher, but wanted to push myself into a new environment. I think experiences is what will make me a better teacher in the future. I hope to be able to take my students on local field trips someday to better connect them to the material we are exploring in class. Learning needs to generate interest and have a purpose and these are two ideas I wish to capture through experiences and discovery in my classroom.