Chapter 4 Questions

Guide to Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse or Your First Year of Teaching
Chapter 4 Questions

How can we tell who is smart or dumb?  What do we do with them?

There are many ways for us to describe someone as smart. This person could be "book smart", "street smart", or any other type of smart you can think of! However, you can't exactly compare one persons level of knowledge to anthers because of the vast difference in the way they were raised and where they are in their life and even how they learn. After reading Chapter 4 a student's level of smart or dumb cannot be measured because it may "have more to do with the environment, rules, and punishments." Some students may not have environments at home that support what they are learning at home or the student may just be unenthusiastic in class. This just means as teachers we need to try different types of approaches to assignments and teaching to get the unenthusiastic students more involved and excited about learning. 

What the heck is schema and what role does it play in how we percieve student intellengence?

"Schema are collections of experience and knowledge about how to react, interpret, or operate in an environment" (Haskell 11). Schema plays a major role in how we tell who is "smart" or "dumb" as explained in the previous question. Student's develop schema's in all types of subject or scenarios such as math, english, even when taking a test. Teachers can't expect students to all have the same schema for the same situation so we need to get an idea of what student's schemas are in a subject or scenario so we can help them in the best way possible for each individual. 


How are students different? What do we need to do for them (that was not done for us)?


No person is the same as another person which in turn means that no student is the same as another student. In the society that we live in today has students constantly learning informally and even personally at all times. Teachers need to focus on a students ability to focus and lean and then incorporate informal learning into the lesson plan rather than just trying to force students to learn formally. In other words, teachers need to incorporate learning using tools and methods that are up to date that are relevant to the classroom and to something that is outside of the classroom. This is different from formal learning which is how we learned where the teacher would lecture at us and then expect us to know how to do our homework and apply what we learned to the real world.