Filling Buckets or Lighting Fires?

I recently came across a very interesting and, I believe, powerful quote by WB Yeats who was an Irish poet.  He stated, "education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire."  This quote provides an interesting approach to and perspective on education.  To me, "filling a bucket" sounds mundane and not fulfilling or enriching but "lighting a fire" seems more vivid and inspirational.  This quote seems to be saying that as an educator, your job is not to just simply fill your students brains ("buckets") with knowledge and facts but to inspire ("light a fire") your students to have a hunger for learning and a natural curiosity about life.  On top of this, it is vital as a teacher that you encourage students, applaud their strengths, and motivate them to improve their weakness.  A dream for me as a teacher is to inspire my students by "lighting a fire" in them to be true world citizens that want to bring about positive change to the world and approach life with a sympathetic, thoughtful, logical, helpful, caring, happy, and educated view of the natural and social world.  Lighting fires also just sounds more fun than filling buckets.

time management, organization, and procrastination

As is evident by the lack of blogs for the past few weeks, procrastination and time management are not my best friends. This is fairly typical of humans but seems more prevalent in younger people. As a student, and teacher I imagine, procrastination can cause many problems whereas time management can lead to great success and just less stress for that matter. My goal as both a student and teacher in the future would be too decrease my procrastination and improve my time management skills. This seems to be a fairly obvious goal that most people would like to accomplish but I would also like to be able to help my students learn strategies to better their time management skills and lessen their urges tom procrastinate. I do not how exactly to accomplish this but I feel that the expert teacher would be more gifted at enabling their students to have effective time management and ways to combat the motives to procrastinate.

A Tough Balancing Act

In class on Wednesday we discussed the importance of being an effective parent. A parent should be involved in their child's social and academic lives. The extent to which a parent is involved may vary and depends on numerous factors including age and maturity of the child to name a few. It is a tough balancing act for a parent because you do not want to be too involved in either your child's academic and social lives but a lack of involvement in either of these areas may be problematic as well. I feel blessed to have the type of parents that I have because I think you were involved at just the right intensity level. We were able to bond as friends but I respected them as the authority in my house. I felt comfortable talking them about profound or taboo topics and they felt comfortable discussing these topics with me as well. On top of this, my parents were a positive motivating influence in my academic life and were also more than willing (my dad may have been too willing) to lend a helping hand with studying or homework or even just advice on life in general. I hope my students have similar parents to mine because I feel this would make the classroom a more productive environment and thus make my job easier. This may be a selfish way of looking at things but good parents like mine I feel will lead to the greater well-being and success and happiness of my students which would be great! This balancing act that parents have the privilege of playing is one that I feel teachers may also be able to play. A teacher may have to balance the level of homework they give in a class to compromise for the different types of students in a class. A teacher may also have to balance their role as an authoritarian and as an almost "friend-like" companion or role model. I look forward to juggling this complex balancing-act and I hope that as a teacher I will be able to master this skill and perhaps even juggle while on a unicycle. In fact, this is my dream for all teachers, parents, and students: that they can learn to balance all that life throws at everyone and succeed in their role as a teacher, student, or parent, and human in general.