The Learning Machine

If you could create a schematic diagram of the learning process in your classroom, what might it entail? 

What pathways would learning take?

What would be deemed as most important?

What could immediately be transferred to waste? 

How much emphasis is placed upon assignments, quizzes and tests?

How important is the pathway that leads to a learner for life?

If you were to take the schematic above and adjust the lines to represent the importance of each path, how might you adjust the daigram? 

Which boxes would be larger for greater emphasis?

Which would be smaller for less importance? 

What processes are missing?

How might your students ideas on this differ? 

How might they be the same? 

If you were to look at your classroom, does it enhance this process or detract from the process?

As a teacher, what do you emanate?

What really matters to you in this work?

What difference can you make where you are, right there, right then?

Is what you do in your classroom moving the future of your students?

What stands in the way of making your students dreams come true?

What are you no longer willilng to accept?

Are you capable of transcending all of the obstacles that are in the way of your mission?

A teacher affects eternity:
he can never tell where his influence stops.

                                            ~ Henry Adams ~



Touching Hearts - St. John Baptist de La Salle

"Do you have faith that is such that it is able to touch the hearts of your students and inspire them with the Christian spirit?  This is the greatest miracle you could perform and the one that God asks of you, for this if the purpose of your work."

This is one of my favorite quotes concerning the vocation of teaching, from the meditations of Saint John Baptist de La Salle.

As educators we must be willing to draw out of our students the character traits and talents, that allow the students entrusted to our care to achieve beyond their own expectations. To allow them to see a future that is ripe with opportunity.  To provide a vision for them beyond the barriers that they set for themselves and provide for them, the paths to circumnavigate those detours to their own fulfillment.  It is the responsibility of the educator to enlighten, strengthen, encourage, develop, imagine, believe and achieve the possibilites for these young adults who are all too briefly members of our community of learning.

"Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want something badly enough. They are there to keep out the other people."

                                          - Randy Pausch -