Check the Chair

Why trust is important
Trust can be a very confusing and somewhat elusive concept, despite it seeming simple and being widely understood in general terms. It is a feeling, something intangible and yet easily altered. For trust to occur there needs to be emotion, feeling and thought involved. It can be simplified to a sense of comfort, ease or relaxation within specific context such as with a person or object which requires interaction. It would be entirely unnecessary to trust in something or someone who will have no impact on your life or the situation.
Trust is not an isolated thing, it is connected to and relies on experience and pre-established knowledge. When sitting down in a chair, most people would not give a second thought to whether the chair would hold them, even if it is the first time in that particular chair. This is simply due to the vast number of experiences with chairs in general and knowing they are most likely able to support their weight. This is a trust in an object and is important in order to reduce the amount of time wasted in a day, as a lot of time would be spent checking a lot of chairs if every person had to check every chair they sat in before they did so.
This idea translates equally well into person to person interactions within a school or classroom. Levels of trust are earned by the teacher and learners alike and each day new levels are established, build up or broken down by simple actions and how they can be interpreted or misinterpreted. When a level of trust is established, it removes the “checking time” taken and allows for content to flow more freely. When a learner trusts that a teacher will deliver only factually correct information that has been well researched, much less time is spent by the learner evaluating the correctness of the information and more time can be dedicated to the understanding of the information at hand. Trust is a relationship with what is not known, the learner accepts that the teacher has done the research but unless the learner does the research themselves and finds out for themselves, they will not know. In this instance trust in a classroom holds great importance as a lack of trust between a teacher and learner could drastically reduce the potency of a lesson as he learner grapples internally on how much time to dedicate to deciphering and understanding the content verses identifying whether the teacher is correct or not.
As a teacher, you would naturally want the best for each of your learners, if not for their own growth then at least for the results which you will have to display come end of year. Trust for a teacher is very similar to trust as a learner in that the teacher cannot force a learner to undertake in any task, nor can the teacher do daily check-ups on every learner with regard to homework etc. the teacher is simply to trust that each learner wants to achieve their best and will do the work to make that happen. However this is not always the case and when a learner proves that they cannot be trusted to work on their own or ae not able to cope on their own, then the teacher is required to take note of this and follow up on the learner. In doing so the teacher puts steps in place for the leaner to achieve and also builds trust with the learner who may in time reciprocate it.

M.

Societal Disability

You are more than your circumstances. The only disability that you have is the disability...or rather the inability to work at adapting to where you are and what you have been blessed with.

Yes there are people who will have more than you. Yes there are people who will be better than you. But nobody.... not even your mother who carried you inside her, nobody knows you better than you know yourself. Life may throw superficial knowledge at you and expect that you accept it as truth, someone may know how you like your coffee or your favourite flower, but none of them will have lived in your shoes or experienced what you experienced.

It is for this reason that you cannot allow anyone to make predictions on or direct YOUR life by what they feel or think. They are not you. I don't mean for you to tell your doctor that they are wrong and that your smoking habit is making you healthier as absurd as that example may be. But what i mean is that you alone determine where you end up in life, your attitude, your level of effort which you choose to put in.

My father always told me never to blame anyone else for my own mistakes or shortcomings, he'd say "if you were pulled over by a police man for speeding, you cannot moan about the person who was speeding in front of you and how they got away. You are the one who was caught and the act that someone else may have gotten away with what it is you were caught for does not detract from the fact that you had done something wrong."

The responsibility to succeed is yours and you cannot be trapped within your own mind or hold back your potential based on what the world tells you, you can and cannot achieve. Prove them wrong what could you possibly have to lose in proving someone wrong. 

As far as ability goes, no one can say they are disabled, merely too lazy to adapt to a world which was not designed for them, why limit yourself to what is already established when you can create so much more.

M.

Interactive Science: The White-Board way

The sciences tend to be filled with a large number of figures and tables as well as drawings and graphs. These graphics can often lose their effectiveness and value when printed in black and white or at a highly reduced size as most schools tend to do.

With the new wave of technology cane the recent implementation of the interactive white board, a technological spin off of the classic chalk board. This option combines the two most used media in schooling, the black board and the computer. It makes use of a projector which projects the images from a computer onto a board which is also linked to the same computer allowing changed to be made on the board which show on the computer as well. This very useful tool allows for good quality imaging to be showed as well as “interacted” with. A useful way of engaging with this technology for one would be the option of zooming in on large images, giving a bigger picture which is often not seen by many students. In doing this one can show a number of processes which interlink in a way learners can identify well with, reducing the compartmentalisation of certain subject matter. The reduction in compartmentalizing could significantly improve the understanding of these processes. A second and by no means less significant use for one of these boards is allowing for students to come up and make their own notes on the board which can be shown to the entire class and aid in everyone’s grasping of concepts.

There are a great many avenues to progress down regarding the use of these boards for a science teacher. Many uses for these boards are yet to be fully uncovered as it may find new use in the hands of innovative and hardworking teachers who do their best to make learning fun and effective.