Tag Archives: Mohammed Uddin

"The What" Check-In

Alternative Schooling Method

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.

Our group Alternative Schooling Moment (ASM) is a tutoring/mentorship center that is not affiliated with the public school system in any way. It is a large center situated in Brooklyn. We are open for only 3 hours each day and employ people from various fields to better accommodate the various students’ interests in their careers and their lives. Most of what we do is teach things that students do not understand in a much more interactive way than just making them read books. More importantly, we give the students advice that can’t be found in books, such as how to apply what they have learned and use that to achieve their goals.

This center is largely focused on creating an interactive learning environment with the students. For example, if someone has trouble with physics, instead of reiterating all the equations that they have read off of books, we will take them outside and show them through different activities what those equations are actually representing. Also, we focus more on the skills that are relevant to each students’ objectives in life. For example, if someone wanted to be an actor, we won’t bother teaching them anything about Chemistry. We would have one of our teachers who is in the field of acting teach the student using our methods. We would then build a foundation for their acting career by doing things such as connecting them with agents. Overall, this center is a place where people attend not to only learn about subjects they don’t understand, but how they can manage their lives in the real world.  

2)  Who will be the audience/students of your ASM? Why?

 The main audience in our ASM are students who are mostly in high school and in college. High school and more so, college, are pivotal parts of a student’s life and are the building blocks of a student’s career. We feel that it is essential to enhance the relevant skills a college student has before entering a particular workforce. Many college students today are strictly enforced to formal education; consisting of taking tests, writing papers, and doing homework. We believe that interactively teaching the students will allow them to be adept in many academic fields. We are not limited to college and high school students, however, anyone who is trying to get on the path of starting a career would be part of our audience as well. This includes adults who have already completed their education, but want to learn more about how they could put the stuff they learned to use for their general welfare.
 We will divide our audience by age and grade level. High school and college students will be separate, however, they will be interacting amogst each other frequently in our center. It is important for all our students to be sociable to promote an enjoyable way of learning instead of just a quiet lecture with no communication as we see in regular schools.  

3) Remembering that learning objectives are active, please list the three main objectives of your ASM?

  1. Our first objective is to find out what subject/field doe s each student needed help with, then assign a teacher from that particular field to work with him/her individually, where they will teach them using interactive methods.
  2. Our second objective is to help students to apply what they have learned to real life application and helps students to develop/strengthen skills that are relevant to daily life.
  3. Our last objective is to set the students up and build a foundation for their career goals.

4) How do those three main objectives reflect your group’s philosophy of education and school?

Our first objective reflects on our philosophy of education by understanding what exactly the students are trying to learn. Once we learn that information, we can further develop methods to create an interactive way to help the student learn that particular subject. This shows how we put a major emphasis on practical education as oppose to formal education. Our philosophy revolves around the idea that students should be able to learn things in a way that they can put to use of it also known as practical education. By understanding what the students want to learn, we can guide them in the right direction.
The second objective is the vocal point of our philosophy. We want our students to apply what they have learned and enhance their everyday skills in order to develop their education. Our last objective is the impact that our philosophy makes. With our unique interactive learning methods, we allow students to build a foundation for their career. Again, we want students to be able to use what they learn in their careers, and that is one of our primary goals at our center.

 

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.

We believe that learning doesn’t merely happen through just the completion of coursework. Successful learning comes from hands-on learning experience. John Locke once said “From experience: in that all our knowledge is founded….our observation, about sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves in that which supplies our understanding with all the materials of thinking” (Locke, 2). Observational based teaching techniques creates relevant, engaging, memorable educational experiences that effectively address the specific challenges that learners face. Making connections between things read off of books and the real-life observations of these topics immediately registers the topic in the learner’s mind. We believe that this is not just because the learner can memorize the material better with observations, but because since the learner is now able to make more sense of the topic and understand it deeper, they will not forget it.  Ultimately, this sharpens our thinking ability with more practice and exposure to observational learning, which is very beneficial in a person’s long-term learning career.

Particular experiences such as traveling and exploring  can be regarded as an essential tactic to learning. This is why we will often times take the students out on trips to do fieldwork. In Frankenstein by Mary Shelly, the monster didn’t obtain education through a schooling system. He also wasn’t taught to read or write by friends or family.  He did however, have the ability to explore his environment.  By traveling around every day and observing his surroundings, the monster was able to gain knowledge about society.  This relates to our philosophy in that it supports our objective of teaching students in a way where they can see and understand things for themselves, with a bit of our help..  We believe that teaching students in the form of interactions engages them better as opposed to reading countless textbook pages. Frankenstein’s monster serves as a perfect example because he used nature to learn and not textbooks. “Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock” (Shelly, 13).  According to Shelly,  knowledge learned through experience allows a person to store more information in the long-term memory. This supports our philosophy because we believe that observational learning methods are more efficient than reading words off of paper.

Theory Check-In

Intellectual Freedom Through Learning from Experience

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“From experience: in that all our knowledge is founded” (Locke,1). It could not have been said any better by one of the greatest philosophers in history. According to Locke, knowledge is derived from experiences in one’s life and allows a person to nurture their mind. Common knowledge in particular, can be better understood and learned through personal observations, sensations towards observations, and actions. It is essential for a person to put use of their skills of learning because it leads to a deeper understanding of their world.  We believe that practical education is the best way to develop a person’s knowledge because it enables the personal to have an enjoyable educational experience, the concepts are better stored in long-term memory and it allows for an unrestricted, free-thinking learning experience.

The scope of practical education is very wide, it can be an educational trip, experiment, or even daily interaction. Practical education concerns the process of learning through observations and actions, rather than through the classic institutionalized way of learning, which is sitting in a classroom and hearing about it from someone else. However, can we put our learning and how we end up perceiving the world in the hands of people in an infamously flawed educational system? Are we really setting ourselves up for success?  Students are provided with knowledge rather than wisdom. It is typical for students to be forced to cram and memorize material to pass a test, just to forget everything right after the exam is over. Students have to try to memorize things they read on paper. However, with hands-on learning, they will automatically remember things just like how their other life experiences are stored in their memory.

Memorization of plain text does not bring any further understanding of the concept unless we manage to transfer the knowledge to action. In Emile: or A Treatise on Education, Rousseau believes that books are the least useful instrument to teach his pupil because he think “they[books] only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about” (Rousseau, 20). What he is saying is that when we “learn” about certain topics in books, we can only relay the information we have read, perhaps in most cases without a true understanding of what we are talking about. Therefore, “learning” from books can be deemed more memorization than actual conceptual understanding.

One example that supports real life experience being essential in obtaining knowledge is found in Frankenstein by Mary Shelly. “Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock.” (Shelly, 13) According to Shelly, the monster was using his environment as a way to gain knowledge. He didn’t know how to read or write, however, he was able to observe his surroundings in order to communicate with others. He didn’t have to go through years of schooling, yet he was able to be intellectually on par with society.  

When education is received through practical methods, it not only enables for a more efficient learning method, but also enhances sensibility. Observation is the most valuable tool for understanding. As John Locke once said “our observation, about sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking.” (Locke, 2) Observations allow us to understand things, and think about them through our own scope. That is one thing that is lacking in institutional education, the freedom to think through your own scope; everyone is always forced to think the way textbooks and teachers want them to think, which may result in hindered learning.

 

Introduction Exercise #1

Introduction Exercise

Frederick Douglass has spent his entire life of misery in search for one thing, happiness, or enlightenment. Douglass knew that reaching enlightenment was not an easy task for colored people like him in the mid 1800s, but that did not discourage him. Douglass’s realizations for how to reach enlightenment were in correlation to Immanuel Kant’s philosophies on enlightenment. Kant once advised those seeking enlightenment to, “have courage to make use of yourown understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment”(Kant 1). What he is saying is that in order to reach enlightenment, one much think for themselves and find their own way to enlightenment, without being influenced by traditional societal perceptions. Douglass followed this motto and took the initiative to learn how to read and write in order to become educated. After becoming educated, a train that was not very common amongst colored people in the mid 1800s, Douglass soon realized what his own self-worth was. He then realized that his life, as well as the lives of all the other colored people, was not to be subjective to other people. Thus began his journey in spreading the message and helping lead other people into enlightenment, by educating people and teaching them how to think for themselve

Peer Response Post

Peer Response: Perfection ≠ Happiness

I choose to do a peer response to Mohammed Uddin’s post because I really enjoyed how his post was formatted and the examples he gave were great. He referred to the list of 13 qualities In the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, in which Franklin believe are the main attributes of perfection. Personally, I believe “perfection” is subjective. What is perfect for one, may not be what the next person considers perfection. However for the sake of the text, I’ll just be referring to the 13 qualities that Franklin mentions. When comparing and contrasting the two texts, Mohammed mentioned “Cleanliness” and the fact that Tom was egotistic and selfish (which I believe falls under “humility”). Through much of the story Tom absolutely displays selfish actions. In chapter 2, Tom’s Aunt Polly asked him to white wash the fence. Not only did he get other neighborhood boys to do his chore, he also convinced them that it was a great privilege and in exchange they would give Tom various gifts to get have such an “honor”. I believe Tom was content with not having these attributes, just as Franklin said he was ok with being imperfect. As Mohammed stated “Even though Sawyer doesn’t meet the 13 attributes that Franklin describes (Tom never strives for perfection), he still maintains a happy and blissful life”. While I consider humility to be an extremely important quality and Tom’s action were not just, as the story progressed he did grow; though, by the end of the story, Tom was still an imperfect being. As M0hammed says “Perfection doesn’t embody happiness” and I could not agree more!