Zachary's Classroom

This week, I watched Sal Khan, let’s teach for mastery-- not test scores, which is a TedTalk that focuses on teaching mastery learning. The main idea of this TedTalk is that mastery learning is a lot more beneficial than the learning most schools use. One idea that I found interesting was that not a lot of teachers don't like teaching the mastery system because it's too much work sometimes. I thought it was interesting because being a high school student that struggles with taking tests when I don't understand something it annoys me that teachers don't want to teach in a way that students will understand. I disagree with this idea because I feel like teachers and school boards should require this type of learning. But doesn't because it could be too much work for the teachers. One piece of evidence that supports my view comes from Sal Khan’s TedTalk. It states that “It was logistically difficult. The teacher had to give different worksheets to every student, give on...

     This week, I read 10 Challenges Facing Public Education Today, which is an article that focuses on the challenges that students and teachers are faced in a public school. But, I focused on one of the sections of the article called “The Pressure Is On.” This section was about how stress is a very common thing in schools nowadays. The main idea of this section is that the stress levels in school are way too high and things need to be changed to make school less stressful. One idea that I found interesting was when Denise Pope related school to a pressure cooker for students and teachers and that they all stress feed off of each other. I thought it was interesting because I never thought of school as a pressure cooker but once I really thought about it, it really is. Like when one person is feeling pressure usually that pressure will be added to someone else. And stress is a very big thing in schools now. I know that if one of my friends gets stressed out I sometimes ge...