Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Response to A Conversation with Lisa Delpit

The most interesting part I took from this Q&A was that teachers can't just "give us the secrets". For example, it is not a teachers job to tell us the answers, but to lead and guide us to find the answers for ourselves. Lisa tells us that it is the teacher job to make the map and provide it. If the students cannot realize this for themselves, especially younger students, sometimes parents or other outside sources are brought in to evaluate. The teacher may be at fault, but is it right to let an outside source evaluate? Through Lisa's experiment with the class that was lectured to by one teacher and split into discussion groups by another, we see that we cannot rely on outside sources to evaluate a teacher's methods. The students all talked about how the lecture was interrupted by their teacher himself where the outside source saw it as being more involved with the students; but did the students really learn? The students felt gave the split up discussion class high marks, while the outside force saw it as lazy teaching. This shows that evaluations show more or less be left up to what the students themselves have learned and not how they were taught. Also, another main point I took from this article was that no matter what your social status is the way you're taught should not be effected. There should be a more personal, maybe even a cultural, reason to shift the lesson.