MY PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION
It is important as a teacher to allow the students to grow from their mistakes rather than try to prevent them from making any mistakes at all. To deny a child the experience of erring and from the lessons they can learn from doing so would deprive that child of his or her ability to grow stronger and wiser. However, a teacher must help to guide students through these mistakes without actually leading them throughout the process.
By allowing students to incorporate their own life esperiences into their writing, a teacher can allow his or her students to find their voices and to connect their own lives into the cannon of education. This not only makes school more enjoyable, therefore allowing students to learn more about writing and literature, but it also allows students to find a release for their anxieties and deepest feelings. A teacher can also teach students how to not only express their feelings and their fears by encouraging them to write about them, but also how to learn from them.
This approach to writing helps to get students through a difficult time in their lives, a time when hormones and mounting social pressures and duties could possibly cause them severe emotional damage. It is after all a job of a good teacher to educate students not only on a given subject, but also in life itself. This approach, of allowing students to write about their personal experiences in life helps to validate these experiences in the mind of the student and it helps to validate their feelings. It also helps to give them a stronger interest in literature as it helps to bridge a gap between the literary masters of yesterday with themselves. By puttng themselves into their work they are able to identify with the process of the writer and can begin to see themselves as important beings deserving of respect, just as William Shakespeare or James Joyce, after all, it is important for any writer to be able to use the written word as a form of catharsis.
Dialogue has long been a diving force in education, having a rich heritage inherited from the Greek philisophical tradition. By embracing this tradition in the modern classroom a teacher can open up his or her students to taking an active role in their own education, which is a far more productive method of pedagogy than simply lecturing them.
Also, by giving ample opportunities for students to engage in dialectics concerning what they are reading with their teachers they are able to interact with an authority figure as an equal, that is of course if the teacher not only listens to all comments made by his or her students, but also respects and values these comments. This kind of interaction between students and their teachers will aid these students in developing strong senses of confidence and will aid in developing keen minds.
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