Albert Einstein once said, “The only source of knowledge is experience”. As an educator, our end goal is to have students experience as many things as possible so that they can form ideas surrounding certain things. When students mindlessly follow facts, they are not critically thinking for themselves. Thus, they are more likely to be swayed by misinformation as they mindlessly follow the news, whether it is true or not. On the other hand, when students think about what is happening in the world, they are more likely to pause on a questionable report before concluding as they do not solely follow what someone says.
As a future teacher in mathematics, the traditional way of teaching revolves around the teacher giving a lesson, assigning homework and then writing an exam. This traditional method does not allow students to experience more than writing exams, so they only leave math classes with some skills needed to do advanced math. As mentioned by Barwell, as math educators, we can do more than teach them skills; we can look into applying these skills with more practical information, such as climate change. While we do not need to be direct, we can have students analyze data and have them come to their conclusions. When we have students do the hard work of cleaning and analyzing the data, they will have a stronger connection with the experience and, thus, a more solid belief in the fact that climate change is real.
Climate change is, in fact, a severe issue. However, you see on the news that plenty of people say otherwise. With the plethora of misinformation, plenty of young folks get swayed by these articles. I hope everyone bands together to deal with climate change, but a significant global climate issue has to crop up to get everyone on board. (Similar to Covid, where lots of death has to occur.) However, with the rate everything is going, it might be too late by then.
No comments:
Post a Comment