Blog Entry 1st Week ( 20/09/2021 - 26/09/2021)

 

For this first week's blog post I'm going to be talking about a picture that, in my opinion, is a very good representation of how the educative system is like. This picture was taken from a TED Talk given by Andrew Hammond, a teacher and writer (among many other things) that has worked in schools for over twenty years. The picture is the following:



The current educative system, most of the times, just focuses on, what in the image would be, the tip of the iceberg: the academic curriculum, all that we can find in books. All this information found in textbooks about a wide range of topics and subjects is really important, obviously. It's what kids are supposedly going to learn when they attend school. From knowing how to multiply, to differentiating the differnt ecosystems found on earth and learning the autonomous communities. All this knowledge is of great importance for them but there are many other things that should be and are, just sometimes, also taught and learned by kids at school. All this is the submerged part of the iceberg. 

This "underwater" area of education is not usually seen, appreciated or even taken into account when it can be as important as the top. All this hidden knowledge is gained by interactions with classmates to work on social skills and empathy, activities to enhance creativity and curiosity and to try to develop the students personality. Life is more than the information found in textbooks and this should be given a lot of focus. The environment in the class is really important to achieve all this "subjective" education that can't be assesed objectively in exams and projects, but that should be an important point when giving classes. 

In a nutshell, there are lots of things that kids need to learn that aren't found in textbooks and that are of great importance for the correct development of the students personality. Knowledge is not limited to the rivers of the world or the musical scale. There's a lot that a kid can and should learn that needs to be taken into account when preparing educative messures or giving classes and that can only be learnt by practice, and not by studying from a book.

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