1) Remembering that your Alternative Schooling Moment (ASM)must happen outside of a traditional schooling environment (college or secondary campus, tutoring centers, or community class spaces), please write two paragraphs describing your group’s ASM. One of our alternative schooling idea is that instead of just in class lectures and tests, there should be more or if not, then at least the same amount of hands on activities so that the students may get a jist of what it is like in the real world. Just by teaching them a concept or idea and just by learning a new idea isn’t enough for a student. It’s extremely important for students to be taught how to apply these concepts in the real world and in a everyday realistic situation. The Second idea is to change the grading system, We will figure out a way to grade students not through the traditional way. Most of the traditional school grade students based on the exams, but we all believed that grading students should never only based on exams. Lots of students have lost their confidence and eventually given up on study because they got a bad grade though exam, and thinking themselves as bad students. Therefore grading shouldn’t be a tool to determine student whether they good or bad, but should be a way to find out what students are really good at, and to encourage them to focus more on what they are interesting of, in order to give them confidence.

2)  Who will be the audience/students of your ASM? Why?  The audience/students for the ASM would be freshman College students but that is still subject to change.

3) Remembering that learning objectives are active, please list the three main objectives of your ASM? The first main objective is Helping students learn through school along with hands on experiences to better help them understand the use of their education and how it applies to the real world. The second main objective is Coming up with a way to get the students to be engaged in the process of learning through experience and interacting them as much as possible. The third main objective is Having a new testing system, where we can test out what is individual student actually good at, and interesting on, therefore we can have the individual focus on of what they are interested in.

4) How do those three main objectives reflect your group’s philosophy of education and school? All these different points reflects our philosophy that there are different ways to learn and attain knowledge. The more options and alternative there are the more individual the learning experience can become. The first objective which is hands on experience lets the knowledge they learn get put into use and the student can decide if that method or material they learn works or if they should use a different approach next time they encounter that situation. Getting the student more engaged will make the learning experience more enjoyable which will increase the likelihood of them becoming more knowledgeable due to their positive experience learning. The new testing system will be more practical and also because it is based on what they are interested they will have a more engaged attitude towards the material which will make them more willing to study and learn the material.

5)  Which two of the readings does your group’s philosophy on schooling and education respond to (either by supporting or challenging)?  Please provide textual evidence of the relationship between that reading and your group’s philosophy.  The two readings our group’s philosophy on schooling and education supports the most are: John Locke’s “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” and Emerson’s “The American Scholar”. These two pieces of work are the ones that most thoroughly support what our philosophy is all about and where we stand on with our beliefs. Locke says that “all ideas come from sensation and reflection; all knowledge is founded on experience” (Locke 2) He rejects the idea of innate principles and tries to convey that they do not really exist. He describes the mind at birth, at a blank state, which is later on filled with experience, not some divine natural light through which the mind can gain knowledge as we go. Emerson, on the other hand, is the one that believes that books are helpful and important, but to a certain extent. For him, books are more of a record of the past, records that “Each age… must write… or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.” (Emerson 3) Being able to be independent and think before we act on things is what sets the humans apart. However, if we only read, without having thoughts of our own, “…instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm.” (Emerson 4) Education, for these two thinkers, and all of us, is not merely the transmission of the ideas from the book writers to the readers. It is and it should be way more than that. Books can be helpful, but are not a fundamental factor of learning.