Shift; Make It Happen!

I read Mr. Fisch’s blog, “180 Days?” It made me think about different points of view. As a student here at Arapahoe, my mind is always busy thinking about homework, class work, and, yes, even how much time I have to go to Starbucks… but I never put my teacher’s world into perspective. What do they have to do? I never thought about how they manage their time, or what they have to do to get us where we need to be by the end of the year. Although we already know (as they have repeated it several times) that we control our own learning… not the teachers. We are responsible for how far we make our brains stretch to learn the most. But… is it really us who decides WHAT we learn? In my opinion, no. I suppose we can teach ourselves things, but the teachers decide what we learn, and we decide to what extent we learn it to. Is it a bad thing? No. I don’t believe so. There just isn’t enough time in the year to learn everything we need to. Which brings me back to the main point… how do they decide what we learn? Scientists, and historians learn new things all the time, which always changes up what we learn EVERY YEAR! So, regardless of what ourselves and our teachers think is important, they all have to decide on what we should learn together. A lot of things must be taken off that list. Things we never even thought we should be learning about. But, now that technology is getting more involved in our lives, we HAVE to change up our learning. Some teachers are more resistant to this. They don’t want to change or learning or their teaching style. They don’t think we have “enough time.” But I believe we have to MAKE TIME. Everyone’s life is hectic and busy, but we are the future and we want to do this right. “This,” meaning our learning. As I mentioned earlier, our learning is not just in our hands, but our teachers hands, too. They need to make sure we are learning the most essential things, and I believe we need to shift our learning strategies, because as we know it, technology is becoming more and more essential to get jobs, or to get into college. Like Mr. Fisch has pointed out, shift happens. Not only do we have to let it happen, but we have to MAKE it happen.