Video Speech

I Beileve

Michael Carbonara

SEDU 183, 2:00

April 12, 2012

I Believe

                We were asked to write five “I believe” statements in my SEDU 183 class today. The “I believe” statements had to be written about Education, Learning, or Teachers. We later shared our statements with others from our class; some of the statements I agreed with and thought they were really good while the others I didn’t really agree or care for. Now I’m not trying to say that some people’s belief statements were wrong because everyone is entitled to their own beliefs. But because of hearing everyone’s believe statements I started to question my five statements. I asked myself if they were good beliefs and why I had wrote them.

Eventually I found one that I thought was really good and it was “I believe that we are all constantly learning every minute, hour, day, week, etc. because we learn new things from everything we experience or from every person we encounter”. Basically I’m saying that we learn from experiences in our life. I came up with this statement very easily because every day I learn something new whether it is because I want to or I learned it subconsciously. Now I use myself as an example because even though everyone learns from experience we all have different experiences. One of the easiest examples of my statement is when I was little I put my hand on the stove and burned my hand even though I was told repeatedly not too because it was hot by my parents. Now, because of that, I never purposefully touch a stove. I’m sure I wasn’t the only naïve little kid to do this despite all the warnings, but I can give you another example of learning through experiences. When you start to date or get to know a person you don’t instantly know everything about them. You gradually get to know who they are from the time you spend with them. Perhaps you learn what their favorite color, their favorite sport, how to stay on their “good side”, the best way to calm them down, etc. An example of learning something subconsciously is music. Everyone has most likely had a friend who constantly plays the same song over and over and because of it, I myself will sometimes catch myself humming the song that my friends are always playing. Even though I don’t know what the song is or who it’s by. If you don’t know what I mean or have never experienced this then you’re most likely the person doing this to your friends.

I believe that this concept can be applied to education and teaching especially in the younger elementary grades. Little kids learn most things by watching the people around them, and they really pay attention to their teachers because up until till about the third grade kids are wanting their teacher’s approval. This means that the kids are watching what their teachers are doing. So if we can set an early example to kids on how to treat others, behave, and good study habits then I believe that it will really benefit the kids and the future teachers of the kids. However we can’t just rely on the elementary teachers to do all the work. So we need to reinforce the good habits of the kids throughout their educational careers while trying to stop the bad habits. Sadly there is only so much that we as teachers can do in the short amount of time we see the kids at school. This is where the parents need to also help with the reinforcement of good behavior.

I believe that learning, in some way, shape, or form, was the reason that most of us wanted to be teachers. Whether it is because they love to learn and want to further their education and teach others what they know, or whether they want to make an impact on some kids life through what they taught. Lets move past the hand on the stove and go and learn something new today.