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The importance of student engagement in learning
The importance of student engagement in learning
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More handpicked essays just for you.
The importance of student engagement in learning
The importance of student engagement in learning
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, is an article published by the Atlantic Journal about the negative effects trigger warnings and microaggressions have on students in college. Trigger warnings are disclaimers about any potential emotional response from a class or its material. Microaggressions are words or actions that have no sinister intentions, but are taken as such. Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. (47)
Higher education is available for most, but many questions are raised by todays woels to whether students are receiving a higher education, and if test scores are becoming more important. From her position as a college professor in the higher education industry, Kay states that lots of students are going to college to get quality education, and are there to learn certain skills for the job they are interested in, and are studying for (39). On the contrary, Lasch believes “that the desire for more relevant courses often down comes down to a desire for ‘intellectual understanding’ courses, so that relevance functions as a smokescreen concealing the reluctance to work hard” (38). One might wonder who is right in this situation; is Lash telling how it is or is Kay?
Education is acquiring a form of understanding and knowledge. Literary texts often depict the notion of the educated and uneducated as judgemental, favouring one over the other,which is evident in Jack Davis’ play No Sugar, written in 1985. Davis presents the plight of the First Australians during the 1930s and their ongoing struggle for survival and social identity during the Great Depression in Western Australia. The dominance of the western institutionalised form of education, means that the intelligence of Indigenous Australians is often undermined. The character of A.O Neville is the epitome of the judging of individuals through societal stereotypes and entrenched prejudices towards Aboriginals.
In Alfie Kohn’s essay, the argument of grade expectations being too overvalued rests on a chain of assumptions, but can be argued. Alfie Kohn’s essay portrays that he wants students to find a variety of different purposes in school, and questions the idea of grades being too centralized. In detail, Alfie Kohn explains how students go to school not for the right reasons, but for the wrong reasons instead. For example, the author writes, “They’d scan the catalogue for college courses that promised easy A’s, sign up for new extracurricular-activities to round out their resumes, and react with gratitude when a professor told them exactly what they would have to know for the exam so they could ignore everything else” (para. 8).
Students not only need to gain the knowledge for the field that they will be working in, but more importantly they need the knowledge of basic life skills on how to think and react to life experiences. It is important for people to understand that knowledge is power, and knowing that it’s not all about you is one of the best realizations one can have. We are all here to collectively work together for some type of common goal. No one person is more valuable than the other. So the next time we are waiting in line in Walmart, we shouldn’t be cursing about how the cashier is too slow, or that they need to open more lines because we are in a hurry.
What this essay is saying about students and education is there is no student who doesn’t want to learn or what’s to get an education. Everybody is capable of learning, but the problem is sometimes the education are given by people who don’t care if you are learning or not. In this essay, we learned that the author was put in classes where the teachers didn’t care too much about their students and because of this he become a mediocre student. Not because he didn’t like school or he was lazy, but because there was no inspiration in learning. Luckily, Mike Rose the author of I Just Wanna Be Average found someone that wants him to start learning someone that make him change his mind.
In “Grade Inflation: It’s Time to Face the Facts” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 6, 2001, Harvey Mansfield, a political philosophy professor at Harvard, describes and informs his reader of the recent increase of grade inflation. Mansfield states how this inflation has not only raised his grades higher and higher but also the grades of students in many colleges in the country. He uses the word, “contempt” to describe how being pressured into changing his grading scale feels and that he has been forced to conform with what has become the norm for many professors in America. Mansfield appeals not only to professors who are cheating themselves out of active students and submitting to the new grading scale, but also to students who are being tricked into thinking this scale is better for them and makes success easier, but who are paying more money for an education that will not last and won’t help them in their future lives. Mansfield is trying to “get attention” to the way
In today’s schools we have at least 5 hours of academics, but in Bradbury’s world, the students get a shorter time to learn unimportant material. “‘An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions... they just run the answers at you’” (Bradbury 27). Instead of being taught mathematics, English, science or social sciences, they learn about technology and sports, which won’t help them succeed in the future.
In the article “The Key to Success in College Is So Simple, It’s Almost Never Mentioned”, the author Jonathan Malesic, uses Emily Zurek Small’s college success story to support the idea that the best way to ensure that one will reap all the benefits college has to offer is by cultivating the students willingness/ desire to learn. Malesic goes on to explain that two of the biggest issues standing in a person's way of success are careerism and knowingness. Although Malesic finds careerism and knowingness to be the biggest factors prohibiting one's success, he also believes that neither mentality is “fixed”. Because of the economy and culture, he notes that students only focus on honing job readiness skills, instead of actually learning and absorbing
In this essay, "Why Literature Matters", author Dana Gioia sets up an argument about literature. Which she uses various ways to persuade her audience be in favor of her proposal; by showing statistic evidence, facts, and historical evidence, as well as some ironies, diction, and the appeals to reader's emotion. First of all, Gioia begins with strong appeals to reader's logos by clearly laying out the statistic source. For example, "According to the 2002 survey of Public Participation in the Arts, the reading population of the Americans is declining. " In turn, is an attempt to point out the thesis statement and make the readers to think out about this topic wile reading through her essay.
“Books give a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight the imagination, and life to everything.” -Plato. This quote shows the importance of books. If there were to be a world without books, the most important book I would keep would be Fahrenheit 451. This book would be important to keep because it would show us what would happen if books were outlawed.
#2 Plato’s Allegory In Modern Day Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” is about the human perspective and enlightenment. In todays society Plato’s allegory is still relevant and is deeply rooted in education. College students are a perfect analogy for the “Allegory of the Cave”. We are told from the very beginning that we need to have an education to be successful in life.
Today more and more people are going to college. Most people go to college to build their knowledge and to study a specific field that they want to get a job in some day. College is marketed to most people as a creative place where they will learn everything they need to know to get a job and enter the “real world”. As college students right now, don’t get us wrong we do learn many things but, we have found that in many classes we take, we just focus on getting a good grade or a passing grade. At the end of the semester we walk out of some class barely learning a thing because we retain information just long enough to do good on a test or exam and then forget it all together when the class is done.
I had made something of value” (Rose, 1989, p. 9). He had met his teacher’s expectation and that made him feel accomplished. On the other hand, if a teacher expects very little from their students, the students will slack on their assignments and tests and become lazy, knowing they will not be
In John Green’s Video, “How and Why We Read” Green states that reading allows us to be able to basically communicate with the dead. I agree with him because even after one dies their message is still portrayed in their book or article. Without people writing and documenting their thoughts and ideas down while on this earth our technology today would not be as advance as it is. Without these ideas being preserved through their writing we wouldn’t have been able to know what one was doing or trying to invent. One of John Green’s arguments was that with reading “we have a fuller understanding of lives other than your own”.