Learning to Unlearn

What do you have to unlearn and relearn about education, teaching, the classroom, or learning?

My English professor last semester always told us that we were going to have to "unlearn everything that we had already learned about writing." This is because many high school teachers did not teach us the correct way to write or did not focus on preparing students to do well in a college English class. In my experience, this is true. A student could write a terrible paper and still get a passing score on it. Most of my English periods in high school were spent as free days. If, as students, we did not feel that we were obtaining a proper education, why are we continuing to use the same old teaching methods that our teachers used?

This means that we have to unlearn everything about teaching methods that our teachers in high school taught us. I am not saying that all high school teachers are bad. It just seemed like the majority of them in my high school did not really care about teaching anyone anything. On the positive side, we know which of their methods worked for the students and which did not.

Here is a list of some of the things that I think that we as future teachers have to unlearn and relearn:

• The teacher does not have to be talking all of the time.
• The teacher should not be the only person working with technology.
• The teacher should not just be giving information all of the time; they should be learning also.
• Students do not all learn the same way.
• Technology can be useful in the classroom.