Blog Post #10

Adventures in Pencil Integrations

John T. Spencer has a blogpost/Cartoon about the argument over whether Papermate or Ticonderoga would be the better choice.:
Character 1: I'm a papermate, I cost less, but Break all the time
Character 2: I'm a Ticonderoga, I'm the most expensive purchase a hipster will ever make.
My first reaction was that obviously papermate was the most reasonable choice and Ticonderoga would be the choice for more serious writers. However, after reading the comments of others and starting to look beyond the surface I have also come up with another theory.
Maybe the point of the story is one that someone I know repeatedly tells me all the time:"sometimes a good investment is better than a quick fix." It's not that using a papermate is bad its that investing in a good pen for the long haul would be the smarter choice. If you constantly buy cheap things and they break, one would probably spend more money to keep replacing it instead of buying something that cost a bit more but lasts a lot longer. Cars, for example are things that people constantly are spending money on. If you cant afford to buy a BMW and you know it costs 3x's as much as your annual salary to be repaired then don't buy it. You can buy a Honda that does the same thing and is more affordable to fix and is more dependable than a BMW. Invest in things that are dependable but affordable. I thought it was a cute cartoon that forces you to think outside the box.

Why were your kids playing games

This dialogue about a teacher and her tactics it sort of interesting. It definitely shows some of the things that are required by law for teaching environments such as the open door policy and some that should be retired like the "slate based education." This type of education is sort of robotic and non-responsive to the students of this generation. Students of today are technology driven and need new fresh learning techniques to encourage them to want to learn. If children sit in classrooms and aren't engaged in learning then they certainly won't be absorbing the information that is fed to them. If this doesn't happen then the children are not learning.
Remember Pencil Quest? is another one of John Spencer's blogs about teaching. This blog talks about a quest that one of his teachers sent him on as a child. The quest would involve a map and some pencils. He was so excited to go on the quest, not because it was involving looking for pencils, but because it was something different, This would be something that he would always remember. As a future educator, I can only hope that I can do something with my students that would make a lifetime impact on them. I want my students to remember the fun educational time that they had in my class. This was a great blog about teachers and students and I really enjoyed it.


Don't teach your kids this stuff. Please?

This blog post by Scott McLeod is about not teaching your children the tricks and trades of the internet. Not teaching your kids how to blog, goggle search, social networking, or making videos are things that they probably already know. However, these are things that school systems tend to push away. They try to push away all these things only seeing the bad side of them not the good side of them. They don't collaborate education with the internet. The internet has so many beneficial sites for educational purposes. Apps on apple computers have so many different learning collaborative tools that students could use. Yet school administration chooses to shoo them away. It's kinda sad because unlike time, education is standing still. This is not a good thing because in the long run our students will be left in the dust to technology.