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Introduction
When I was seven years old, I subconsciously started to understand about my beliefs of
teaching and learning. As a seven year old, fear and no faith in myself was stopping me. I wanted
those training wheels. They were keeping me safe from bloody knees and a tearful face. My
sister was five, and still had hers and my cousin still had one. My mom had just taken both of
mine off, and I did not want to learn how to ride without my training wheels. Explaining to my
mom that I could not do this, I was not smart or good enough; she looked at me and said, You
can. You have the potential to do it. You have been practicing and with that you just need to
understand the moment you start you keeping pedaling and when stop stick your feet to the
ground. Also, what is most important is when you do fall you get up and try again. This was not
a lesson on how to ride my bike but a lesson that I still follow today. Taking a risk, learn from it,
and getting up and trying again; is that not what learning is? For me this matches up with the
Perennials style of teaching. The kind of thought process I want to have as a teacher, is that I
want to not only teaching facts, but also helping the students to do anything they can set their
minds on (Foundations of American Education, 2010, p. 72). My mother was training me for
life. Riding a bike was not only good for just a normal bike but also the one that I advance
towards, like the mountain bike which was a little different in how it stopped.
My Beliefs
All around me, I hear people say that teachers teach students for jobs that are yet to have
been even created. So that idea of teaching for something that has yet to be created and yet
teachers are teaching for jobs we have now, with facts that could not even be facts in the next
twenty years. I believe that teaching students to question what they are taught, and to understand
that they can have the potential and ability to understand is really important. The Perennial
philosophy says that the purpose of school is to prepare for life, cultivate intellect, teach eternal
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truth and also train the will (Foundations of American Education, 2010, p. 72). In schools, we
focus on teaching information that we feel that the students might need in the future, and
honestly I have not used some of the stuff that I have memorized for many test I have not used. I
feel like, that time was wasted. I was learning to memorize information or a stepping system to
get the right answer, and not how to truly find an answer. In Perennialism by teaching the great
ideas of the Western civilization, students have the potential to solve problems during any time
period (Cohen, 1993, part 3). For me, this seems about right because I believe that we need to
teach in a way that students can solve any problem that they come across.
My faith holds a huge part in the way I think about teaching and learning. John Wesley,
the founder of the Methodist church states in his The Character of a Methodist, we think and let
think which means that we think about something and we allow thinking about ideas in our
belief (Wesley, 1872). In my church children can be seen asking questions to the preacher, that
potential can be opposite of what she believes. I was taught to seek the answers about what I
believed in and what I did not. This searching and understanding my beliefs did not happen just
in the church, but beyond it too. My mother would ask me questions and I had to prove why I
believed in something, and counter argue. It did not matter what I believed was the same or
different, it was because I was looking at it and thinking about it was what mattered. So for me,
teaching needs to be more than just giving an answer or allowing students to just memorize that
information. It is about critical thinking skills and learning how to question and find the answer
those students needs, not only in the classroom but in life.
We are lifelong learners and school is the foundation that everything is added to. If it is
filled with useless things, it will fall apart in the future. That is one of the reasons; I believe that
we need to teach how to do something that can be useful for the future and not information that
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would be useful for just the next year. Being a lifelong learner, we have steps in which we are
ready to learn something. This is why the Montessori movement holds truth for me where the
Perennialism philosophy really does not. We should be teaching students the information that we
say is necessary for them to understand the world in steps and only teaching them those steps
when they are ready for them (Foundations of American Education, 2013, p.166). For me it
matches up also with key points of Perennialism, that Adler suggested, because it has three
methods of teaching and each of them are carefully chosen, so that they develop a students
intellects (Foundations of America Education, 2010, p 71).
Being ready for a subject is important but what counts more is how the teacher treats and
teaches the student. Being, a dyslexic person, I had a hard time reading and writing, phonics
meant almost nothing to me. School and learning was a problem. This is why my kindergarten
teacher is one of my reasons for wanted to do certain things in my class room because my
teacher cared for me. She made me want to learn even though I had to take three times the
amount of the other students. She never did or said anything that made me feel lower than
everyone else. Her wanting me to do well is one of the reasons that I did. I wanted to make her
proud of me. The opposite happened when I reached into the higher levels. Drawing helped me
pay attention and remember information. For my teacher, I was being a bad student, and no
explaining would change the way she thought. She labeled me as a student who would just get by
and never pushed me. That caused me to believe she did not care and that I did not really care if
she thought I was a good student or not. I did poorly in her class. What happened to me is normal
for any student. Dennis Reynolds in his paper Restraining Golem and Harnessing Pygmalion in
the Classroom: A Laboratory Study of Managerial Expectations and Task Design, states that if a
teacher holds high expectations for his or her students they reach for them, and if that teacher
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does not hold them to it they never reach them (2007, p.475). Teaching with higher standards
and being that positive teacher allows students to become successful. That is why I believe that a
positive attitude and treating kids as having all the potential in the world is what we should be
doing and teaching.
What my Belief Would Look like in an Elementary School Classroom
Being a lifelong learner, we need a starting point for the race of our lives. When we are
born we are training, figuring out the simple things to get us started. For example, talking and
learning about the simple things in the world around us are included in the training. For me, my
race started when I was four with a daycare that spent time preparing us for pre-K, but for most it
is pre-K. Pre-K is where we start the race for becoming lifelong learners and being prepared to
solve those problems that soon challenge us. School is the place during our race where we have
our cheerleader in those moments we need them. It keeps getting harder and we need to know as
little kids that someone is there for us, like our parents and our teachers. More than a few people
can say that because of their teachers, they are doing something that they want to or made
learning more of a choice then a demand. That in itself shows why we need school and the
purpose of it.
In our race, school is the place where we also learn more about ourselves. Before school,
we watched our parents, our grandparents and everyone else to do things without understanding
the reasons. All we had was the action and the effect. Like Neil deGrasse Tyson states All
children are scientists, we are born to solve and understand the problem (Erickson, 2012). That
means children are born to wonder and also solve. As a seven year old, I knew that electricity
turned the lights on and made my blow dryer work. My question was how? This led me to get the
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shock of my life, I found out that one was where it comes out and the other is where it goes back
in. That is why plugs have two prods.
In a students race of being a lifelong learner and reaching the finish line, we just cannot
see we should just hand students information that makes parts easier but we need to positively
challenge them. When they do reach a point where school and teacher are no longer there they
have the knowledge that will benefit them in their lives. For me, this means that we need them to
question, and find a way to solve a problem. Instead of teaching them about how great people did
something, we should compare them to someone else and also to think of what would happen if
they did not do the impactful things that they did. We need more critical thinking and life
lessons for younger kids that will benefit them in their race. In my field experience, kids were
asking me questions and expecting me to just hand them the answers. When I did not they did
not know what to do. Even when I was trying to finding the information, they still had a look of
confusion on their faces. Their race is becoming a challenge for them because as they get up in
older level the critical thinking skills, they will need more. Those things are some of the things
we need to focus on when we are teaching math, science, history, and language arts.
In our lifelong learning race we can struggle with parts of it but school allows us to
conquer the struggles. Not only because of teachers, but also the fellow classmates who are
going through those same things. Group work should be an instructional method that should be
used because it allows students to see the information that they are learning possibly in a new
light. Another is we should not teach on a grade level based system, just because a student is the
age as another student does not mean they are at the same place in the race. We need to focus
more on when a student is ready and not just because they are at a certain age. Another
instructional method, which would be important in classroom learning environment would the
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cause and effect that activates allows each of the intelligences to get a little strength in the race.
With this part some of the racers are going to cause problems and rules are always good. Rules
are the guidelines for this race and if the teacher does not do something that shows the student
that behavior is not appropriate they keep on doing it. With classroom management as a teacher,
we need to get to know our students and understand that students are going to test us because
they wonder why and how and the effect that will happen when they do something. In my field
experience, I have learned that some students need to just too silently watch them do something
and then do nothing which they then stop and other who would keep doing it.
For this race, I feel that tests are the cutting the corners part. As a student, I did not learn
the stuff that I needed I memorized the stuff for that test that I had to past to get the grade. Essays
and projects that make a student use critical thinking skills, and wonder why something happens
make sure they really understand the ideas and concepts. Another way to assess a classes
learning is by having a set of standards for how they present something; using creativity, the
information given, and critical thinking skills. These ways of assessing their learning helps with
stopping the memorizing but potential gives them information about ways of doing something
that they have yet to understand.
Conclusion
As a teacher, what our teachers have done and have not done greatly impact us. Our
parents and our community members all effect how we see the ways that benefit the learner we
teach. We teach for the future and I believe that we are cheating children in the race of being a
lifelong learner. We are giving them short cuts, allowing them to just memorize information and
not think about it and question it. I believe that we need to stop, as teachers, thinking at the
section where we are teaching but we need to look at the next section and the next until the end
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of our students race. We can prepare them by teaching normal school lessons with the life
lessons they need to have to become successful in a world that we can only imagination what
will look like.




















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References
Cohen, L. M. (1999). Philosophical Perspectives in Education. Oregon State University:
of Education. Retrieved from http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/ed416/PP3.html
Erickson, Megan (2012). Neil Degrasse Tyson: Science is in Our DNA. Humanizing
Technology. Retrieved from: http://bigthink.com/humanizing-technology/neil-de-grasse-
tyson
Reynolds, D. (2007). Restraining Golem and Harnessing Pygmalion in the Classroom: A
Laboratory Study of Managerial Expectations and Task Design. Academy Of
Management Learning & Education, 6(4), 475-483.
Webb, Dean L., Metha, Arlene., Jordan, Forbis K. (2010). Foundations of America Education.
(6
th
ed.). U.S.A. Pearson.
Wesley, John. (1872). The Character of a Methodist. Thomas Jackson edition. Retrieved from:
http://www.umcmission.org/Find-Resources/John-Wesley-Sermons/The-Wesleys-and-
Their-Times/The-Character-of-a-Methodist