Why does this matter to me?

I think I need to start tonight’s blog off with correcting the title of my last blog….clearly I was TOO stressed to catch the mistake that I forgot to put two o’s in the TOO of TOO stressed. And the work still continues. I’m very glad that this will be the last blog: just one more thing to cross off the list and not worry about any more! To be perfectly honest though, I don’t really know what to write this final blog on. After so many posts this semester I seem to be running out of ideas. So instead of writing about what we read about in this weeks chapter (of which there wasn’t one), I am going to end these blogs posts with a few thoughts about our assignments, and how it connects to my life and the big idea that I’ve gotten out of this course.

To start off, I’m going to discuss the topic that my group chose for our genius hour, something that was a very important topic to all of us, and something that I think relates to a lot of what we’ve been learning about in the course. Actually, that’s probably all I’m going to talk about because I have so much to say about it! The major idea that I have gotten out of this class is simply about 21^st century learning; that we need to bring our classes and teachers out of the rut everyone is in and into the 21^st to make learning more relevant and effective. That’s the “big picture” that I’ve seen permeate throughout this course. However, I think that this can be interpreted in many ways besides simply creating an integrated curriculum, or bringing technology into the classroom: there are countless opportunities to make classes more applicable to students lives, and actually relevant for them to participate in.

This all comes back to what my group did for our genius hour project. Being in phys ed, there are often a lot of negative connotations around it being a joke, or a class that doesn’t matter. However, what most people don’t realise is that the goal of physical education (to create people who are lifelong movers, or “active for life”) is a very important part to creating individuals who are healthy and successful outside of school. This is something that should be permeating throughout all of the rest of school classes: healthy individuals who are active can actually better learn through other courses.  This comes back to integrating classes together; I don’t think an integrated curriculum just means that you have to teacher three subjects in one assignment per say, but if we can even bring them back to relate to each other, so students can transfer learning from class to class, each subject becomes more relatable for students.

Speaking of relatable, when people see physical education as an insignificant “easy” credit, they are missing the importance of the course. And I think this is where we need to change the way we approach the curriculum to bring it into people’s everyday lives. As we discussed in the genius hour, the “typical” education class benefits really only one type of individual: the one who is “good” at sports. These students tend to thrive in the typical curriculum/set up of a phys ed classroom, whereas those who aren’t as good at the “classic” sports get frustrated and stop taking it. This is completely against the objective of creating lifelong movers, because when they drop out of physical education, students often tend to get frustrated about movement and general. This is because in the 21^st century this old school gym class is no longer meaningful to many students, which means it is no longer effective. So, bringing classrooms into the 21^st century isn’t just about technology, especially since this isn’t necessarily an asset that can always be used. It also isn’t just about integrating the subjects. There are so many different ways that this can be accomplished, all with the goals of making physical education applicable. You could create a more global focused curriculum through bringing in different games from around the world (like sepak takraw, or bocce ball: see the article I used for my wiki contribution on different global games to bring into the classroom, Gross, M. K., & Burchanan, A.M. (2011). Integrating Global Games in the Elementary Physical Education Curriculum. Strategies, 25(1), 8-12., http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08924562.2011.10592126). You could give daily strategies or activities that are easy to incorporate into students busy lifestyles. Instead of teaching different formal games, you could use the TGFU (teaching games for understanding) model to make the course more relevant to students who simply don’t care about knowing how to perfectly play basketball, soccer, volleyball etc. 

http://www.iphys-ed.com/inquiry-in-pe/category/tgfu 

There are so many different ways to make the class more relevant and bring phys ed into the 21^st century I’m sure these ideas hardly even touch on the opportunities that are out there. Anything that can make classes more important in the everyday lives of students (by bringing the course material into the 21^st century) can only be more beneficial to the students.

An article I found discusses the importance of making physical activity more important, as it affects so many other parts of academic life: even increasing test scores. However, far beyond the importance of test scores is something that has come up again and again in my blogs, and that is one of the main challenges facing phys ed: how grade obsessed we have become. Now I’m not saying that I have the solution to this problem, I really do not know how to combat it. But if we find a way to make phys ed relevant beyond that of simple grades, maybe we will see more students remaining active throughout their everyday lives, and continuing on with physical education classes.

http://activeforlife.com/physically-active-kids-increases-academic-scores/

With these improvements, brining physical education into the 21^st century, we can hopefully create students who are ACTIVE FOR LIFE.

As a final thought in this final blog post, I would like to leave you all with a message that could hopefully make physical activity more relevant in your lives today, despite any issues with your previous experiences through physical education. Physical education isn’t just about running circles in a gym, or going to work out, or even playing a sport. I mean hey, if that is what you enjoy go for it! But for those of you who don’t, don’t get discouraged. Being active is about so much more than these typical ideas. If you like music, dance around your house! Only have 20 minutes a day? Do an ab workout while watching TV. Take a class on a new game you've heard about, or something that interests you that maybe you saw in the Olympics. Physical activity doesn’t have to be difficult, or boring. Find something in your life that interests you, and find a way to incorporate physical activity into your daily life, so you can become ACTIVE FOR LIFE.

http://activeforlife.com/

I'm way to stressed for this....

There is so much work to do lately, I think my head might explode-so I'm going to keep this one short. For some reason this November is so full of assignments and tests and what-not; I think teachers must think that we don’t need to sleep. Or that we have clones that help us do our work. Or something along those lines. This has caused me to become a person who is a ball of stress, consistently at the verge of unravelling.

http://www.sheilapartridge.com/articles/stress-the-enemy/

Again, I think this all comes back to marks; I'm sure I wouldn't be so stressed if we weren't so focused on getting those 90’s. Recently a phrase has been popping up every so often amongst my friends in fourth year: “C’s get degrees”.  Although this is true (and it really shouldn't be marks that we’re concerned about), I for some reason can’t seem to stop myself from worrying about getting the best mark possible. And make note on this: I did not say that I was focused on doing my best, or learning the most. It’s about getting the best mark, because that is what reflects our “learning”. However I am becoming more and more frustrated because I don’t think that I'm doing anything that will actually help me. All of these theories and practices we’re learning, without the experience to back it up I just feel like another student working towards the grades, who isn't really prepared for the real world that’s out there.  And as a future educator, this is not what I want to happen to any of my students. I hope to be a teacher that actually causes them to learn, and not just care about marks.

However, this reminds me of the living contradictions that were briefly discussed in chapter 6. In this, it talks about the idea of “I used to think” versus “I now think”. This is an interesting concept where it explores the idea of what teachers think before they're teaching, compared to what it is actually like in the classroom. I think through all of our classes it’s easy to say that we have certain ideals that we plan to follow in our classroom. We talk about our power bases, or having a student-directed classroom, but when it comes down to it what we might actually do in the classroom could be completely different. We may think that we want students to actually learn, or explore their interests, but what happens when it comes down to the time crunch of including everything that the curriculum requires? More importantly is the main focus of the contradictions, which is the need to scaffold learning, while also challenging students to discover things on their own. We know from our discussions in other classes that one of the most important aspects in fostering higher level thinking processes is the opportunity to explore. However, teachers need to find a way to balance this while also fostering their learning through clear information.  And I think that as students that have always been focused on marks, as well as mostly having information given directly to us (lack of exploring), that is something that we will struggle with, as we may fall into teaching in the ways in which we were taught.

However, project-based learning, or an inquiry based approach can be a very effective way for students to actually be engaged in their learning within the classroom. Kids are naturally curious, and instead of schools killing this curiosity, we should have teaching methods that instead foster that want to learn. Below is an interesting video that I found very relatable to the idea of inquiry based learning as a whole. Instead of reverting to the ways in which we were taught, and continuing to put the emphasis on marks (and therefore stressing students out instead of causing them to be excited about learning), we need to look at new ideas to be a 21^st century teacher.

So, to circle back to the beginning of this post where I talked about my stress, I would instead like to leave everyone with something that I am interested in and excited about. Though it may not necessarily be learning that I'm excited about, at least I'm enjoying something….and have something to take my mind of the stress of getting good marks! So here it is, the excitement of the upcoming minion movie!