Monday, July 23, 2012
Would education be better if we where more entertained by our teachers?
Neil Postman briefly went over in the first chapter on how the most rememberable teachers are the teachers that interested you the most. Throughout the book, Neil progressively unveils the argument that americans need to be entertained, our news station is filled with incoherent fragments, and we see this as informational. Our minds have been transformed by our media, our mines are fragmented, and incoherent, and we are not able to sink into deep thought as easily. Should our education bend in order to fit our new mindsets? We all recall Bill Nye the science guy's entertaining yet educational videos, was our education benefited by the fact that we where intrigued? Is it logical to say that in order to communicate efficiently to the upcoming generation, we should then change the language of education? Would adding more pictures, movies, short clips, and games to education ,to increase the excitement in learning, benifit us? Is it no longer whether or not we want to be entertained, or that we need to be entertained. Especially in our age, the world has more forms of entertainment then ever before, children are not growing up in a world where they play with the neighborhood kids, instead they are glued to television screens, and laptops. Would making education more entertaining, through technology, be a progressive movement or would this further destroy what is remaining of our inability to concentrate.
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Being entertained by our teachers is an effective way to remember the content we were taught but I believe entertainment should only be used in certain aspect of teaching or learning, such as playing a catchy song to remember the elements on the periodic table or a silly rhyme to remember to a math equation (those rhymes are honestly the only reason I remember basic math). But as Postman pointed out multiple times, entertainment tends to take away the seriousness and importance of a subject which can all together demolish the reality of it. As long as entertainment is used at appropriate time and both the educator and the student are aware of when entertainment is appropriate, it can be a progressive way to teach and learn.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Savannah because if teachers did not show any clips or incorporate entertainment in any way with their teachings, then most students would find it hard to concentrate. Most teachers would also use humor to entertain their classes. Usually the classes that do do this, I usually end up doing better in. But in one of my previous classes, my teacher barely taught and mostly showed us irrelevant clips and always had teachers visiting his class. So in this case, this is over using entertainment in classes and would only hurt students. So teachers should only use entertainment to prove a point they are making and like Savannah said, to help us remember what they are teaching.
ReplyDeleteI think that our concentration would be extremely harmed in a society where entertainment is the primary form of teaching/learning. By teaching only with video clips and pictures, our attention spans could become much shorter. Even if we were to be given useful information in our classes with the use of videos and pictures, we most likely wouldn't be able to remember it all without studying some form of printed word. I do believe that there is a limit just as Kaylin suggested. We should only use entertainment to prove of point and/or to further obtain our interest in the subject being taught.
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