What’s Our Sputnik?
It seems to me that the youth of today are more concerned
with the latest video game, cell phone, or facebook post. It is hard to pull
their minds out of the new technology and into the classroom. From reading
about the past, it sees the people of the United States loved their country, they
found pride in making this country better. Today, it feels like each person is
in it for themselves or find a way to take from someone else’s hard work. The terrorist
attacks happened at the beginning of my senior year of high school and the war
followed soon after. At the time, I felt these attacks would spur our country
into World War III which would pull our country together to fight the
terrorists. Yes, a war did start, but I did not have a personal connection to
it. In order for our school system to prepare students to solve our nation’s
problems we need to create a sense of unity in our country. As teachers, we
need to get our students to see the importance of creating alternative energy
resources, creating new war technology to save our troops, and find ways to
make our country less dependent on others. In my classroom, this means we need
to spark s person’s natural feeling of competitiveness. We need to get our
students thinking outside of the box looking at our nation and start thinking
of solutions to our problems. Other countries either want to be us or want to
beat us and the way our nation is headed it is going to be easier than ever
before. Hopefully it does not take
another World War or another country taking over America to inspire people to
look at the bigger picture to motivate our nation to be who we were sixty years
ago.
Jessica,
ReplyDeleteI know how you feel. Students today seem to depend more on technology and less on imagination. This year was the first year my school gave us permission to set up a class Facebook page and Twitter account. I felt it was important to use a tool they were quite "in" to to get their attention in science. So far, so good.
I agree that it has become ever more difficult to motivate students to do much of anything. I sense the lack of drive, pride, and healthy competitiveness. It's easy to say the answer lies in appealing to their interests, such as social media; however, what they typically post has little substance to it, and I don't see school or national issues being hot topics for them. What I try to do is begin small. I have always tried to instill in my students a sense of pride in themselves, their school, and its environment. Just a little thing as getting them to turn in a neatly written paper with their name on it has been a daunting task! I usually rely greatly on discussion and finding reasons why they should care. Having now completed my course of studies at Walden, I think I will use this school year to take my efforts a bit further and implement social media. Instead of just having my students participate in in-class classroom discussions, I will also have them participate in a blog as a follow-up to what we discussed in class. That way, I get the face-to-face interaction and they get the technological aspect of it, preparing them in a 21st century fashion.
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