Great ideas for future teachers!

The edible school yard was about a middle school in California that is using a different method to teach social studies and science. The students are planting and keeping up with a huge garden and learning many different things. They also take the things they plant and make different foods. A Night in the Global Village was about a school that takes a group of students and puts them in the place of people from other countries. They have to trade with each other to get basic supplies like food, water, and wood for a fire. This extreme experience helps them be more conscious of poverty and hunger and how they effect other countries.

I think both of these videos can be of use to me as a future teacher. They both have their own lessons that teachers can learn from. One of these is that it can be great for the students if their teachers break from traditional curriculum. Students can learn a lot from a traditional curriculum but do they really remember it? Teachers should come up with fun and interesting experiences to teacher their students certain concepts. The students will likely remember these fun experiences for the rest of their lives. Also these experiences teach student things that they cannot learn from a book. They can learn things like cooperation and working together to create a product.

Another lesson that can be learned from these videos is that with a traditional curriculum not all students have a chance to succeed. However, if teachers try new and interesting ways to teach a concept, students that fail in a traditional curriculum may succeed. For example in the edible school yard video a teacher talked about how someone who is not good at math or who is not articulate may be great with their hands. Conversly a student who is great at math may not be so good at gardening and working with their hands. I think both of these lessons are important and I will definitely keep them in mind when I become a teacher.