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The education I have gained leading up to college has consisted of temporarily ingraining the information established in a classroom into my brain for its immediate regurgitation and even more immediate disposal. This thought process like those of many students, I argue, is ineffective for learning because it fails to form a solid foundation of knowledge to build upon and continue learning from. For once the exam on say ecosystems is over with, all-relevant information is forgotten about, allowing the succeeding topic in the curriculum take impermanent home in my brain.

The little knowledge I did gain throughout my pre-college education can be well summed up in the phrase “a mile wide and an inch deep.” Acknowledging that, I’d like to argue that educational potential is contingent on the teachers involved. Students can only excel as far as their teacher’s allow them to go within the restraints of the classroom and more importantly the repertoire of knowledge they themselves have to offer. As a second grade teacher from Overbrook elementary once told me, teaching is like being a Jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. Elementary school teachers in particular are given what I feel an unfair amount of responsibility when, on top of being a second mother for the students, are expected to teach the them all of the major subjects in academia (language arts, science, mathematics, and history). One should not expect a student to automatically gain an aptitude in a certain aspect of science if their teacher can’t.

Whenever I look back on the education I have received, I feel as though the years that have gone by could very easily be abridged simply by excising all of the time spent re-teaching the material and teaching things that were not geared towards aptitude examinations. For the only things I took with me after coming out of elementary school included the three R’s: reading, writing, and arithmetic, three things of which were not even at mediocre standards after so many years. Thinking about this reminds me of a stand-up performance about educational retention I had seen in the education class on Math and Science Pedagogy I took this past semester. It brings up the idea of creating and enrolling into a “Five-minute University” and gaining the same amount of factual knowledge one would still possess five years after graduating from a more conventional institution. Please follow the link provided below to watch this short skit.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=kO8x8eoU3L4

My educational experience really has been very much of a blur, the main reason to account for this is the fact that the teachers were not prepared to handle students of all different learning levels properly, forcing the class to progress only as fast as the most difficult or sacrifice other teacher’s and student’s time to cover the same material to the class the following year. The actual internalization of the material discussed is vitally important for a student to form a malleable tool to tackle real world applications when in the classroom and more importantly when in the actual real world.

Whenever I hear the phrase real-world applications or applications for that matter I automatically think about a pen and paper, there being a exam going on, and the student being tested on their ability to understand and apply a certain concept. What many people do not readily associate “real-world applications” with is the real world. I would argue that schools do a poor job at making solid links between the lessons learned in school and its influence on the student/environment/etc once the notebook is put away. Science in particular is rarely seen as a round-the-clock, subconscious human behavior just like breathing. But instead, most of society believes that science is confined to the four walls that make up a science classroom or laboratory. (As a small aside, simply using the world laboratory perpetuates the idea that science can only be conducted properly within a designated area.) Although students are not equipped with the same rulers or triple balance beam once outside the school building, they are still capable of making observations and forming criticisms and questions in respect to that, furthering there understanding on the world around them.

After finaly stepping into the completely different realm that is a college introductory science course, I realized that personally I do not have to know all of the science there is in order to accept, understand and, most importantly, enjoy it. The particular course is Professor Grobstein’s Biology 103 Basic Concepts, which did not include a textbook, to learn from or a traditional biology midterm and final to test how much information was retained and thoroughly understood. The most interesting thing I found in the class was the fact that you can use the pre-existing knowledge you have about the world-the science you have gathered throughout life-to make sense of the different aspects of life on your own. Not to get this confused with the inadequate amount of science being learned and actually understood in the lower levels of education, I came to terms with the fact that science is continually transforming, becoming something more, something different as time goes on. This scientific freedom has sparked my interest in its history, evolution, practice, and representation rather than my direct participation in it. To a certain extent, conducting the science is not what I want to be tested on and is why I will not pursue many more hardcore science courses in the future.