My Observations

The “flatworld that Friedman describes is changing the future of our students and teachers. Because many teachers are afraid to abandon their traditional practices and grasp new ones, we are doing a great injustice to our students.
After reading and discussing the classroom scenario, I began to analyze my own student teaching experience in the middle school. I realized that the main skills that students need is the ability to orchestrate, adapt, and collaborate. During observation and student teaching, I do not think that the students always did this. I feel as though the teacher took over the class and made the students study what the teacher deemed necessary. When I did student teaching I tried to make the students do as much group work as possible. I felt that they leanred better this way because they were able to bounce ideas off of one another. Also, I picked their groups. I did this because I felt that in the “real world” students will not be able to choose with whom they work.
However, I admit that I did not make my students truly orchestrate their own learning. I feel that I set up the lessons and made them adhere to what I thought was important for them to learn. After doing this weeks reading in Friedman’s book, I realized that when I have my own classroom, I will make my students take charge of their learning, and my role will be to guide them and help them explore. ELA classrooms that do not promote student exploration and student centered learning are not preparing them for the global market. When teachers set up the curriculum and do not involve the students, they are only preparing them for “low-skilled manual labor”(266). And according to Friedman, Americans who are only prepared for manual labor “will have to upgrade their education and upgrade their knowledge and skills, so they can occupy one of the new jobs”(266) . I feel that as teachers we should want to prepare our students to take up these new jobs and not take up manual labor only to find out that they cannot succeed in this new world.