Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Children Are People

"To be a "gifted" teacher is really just possessing the knowledge that children are people and then proceeding to treat them like people, loving them, and listening."

I have said things like this before; that the way teaching happens these days is not the way it should happen.  The best advice to teachers is to treat students like people.  This sounds like a "duh" kind of thing, but think back to your own school years.  How often were you treated like a cog in a machine, or a person of less value/standing/importance than the teacher, or simply one of the crowd of students?  I would bet that it happened, and still happens, more often than we like to admit.  Those stellar teachers who manage to break the mold end up being the most effective and the most loved.

The above quote is from Teacher Tom's blog, and I highly recommend reading more of his posts.  He teaches preschool in a play-based learning center.  I would love to explore how the ideals of play-based learning could apply to school-aged children and even higher education.  What do you think?  Leave your thoughts, ideas, and comments below.

[This is post #98.  We're getting close to 100!]

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Running update

Lots of fun new things in this department.  My brother (barefoot running aficionado) gave me a gift card to Dick's Sporting Goods for Christmas.  Although Dick's doesn't stock Vibrams, they did have the Adidas version, called Adipure.  I went and tried a few pairs on to determine the correct fit, and decided to get them.

I'm still here!

Although it may have seemed that I invented anti-gravity shoes and subsequently fell off the earth, this is not the case.  The truth is much more mundane: it was a busy end-of-semester, then I was traveling, then I was home with my family.  None of those activities inspired me to write a blog post.  But never fear!  I am hopping back on the blogwagon (heh, heh) here in the new year.  Look for updates about running, knitting socks, cooking food, and other enticingly exciting topics.