Blog Post #10

After watching the video Do You Teach or Do You Educate? , I definitely plan on being an educator. I like how the video showed the difference between the two. In the video a teacher is is described as someone  who becomes a teacher just to teach. They spit information at you, and expect you to spit it right back on a test. They like to showing how things are done and also like explaining how things are done. Punishment is an option when something isn't done on time or not the way they want it done. An educator is described in the video as someone who inspires you. A person who wants to educate you and in the process be your mentor, a person you trust. That is the person I want to be when a graduate and start working.

I decided I wanted to become an educator about two years ago. Up until that time I had know idea what I wanted to do and it took two years of taking general classes for me to figure it out. During my first two of college, I met a boy who suffered from Aspergers syndrome. I never met anyone before who had suffered from this disease. I got to work with him on his homework and listened to him talk his love for music. He really inspired me to want to work with kids and help educate them. I want to be the person that kids can learn from and come to for anything.

Tom Johnson's Don't Let Them Take The Pencils Home was a well written blog and a reality that I am going to have to face when I become an educator.  In the blog, John Spencer writes about a conversation between him and the School Curriculum Instructional Interventionist Academic Specialist named Gertrude. Gertrude tells him not to let his students take home pencils and paper, that it could result in lower standardized test scores. She also talks about starting a parent pencil program. Gertrude says how parents don't even know how to use pencils, since they don't use them in their jobs.While reading this blog I was confused on what they were talking about, but after reading the comments it makes since. The pencils represent computers. I then reread the blog and understood the message better. I think that parents should know how to work the technology students use in their classroom, so when the students come home the parents can help and know how to use a computer. If parents don't know how to use a computer, then maybe they should attend a program like Mr. Spencer wrote about in his blog.