Freire's chapter was hard to read, honestly. I can't imagine teaching students like that, let alone that there are teachers out there that already do. I wanted to believe that I came from a different school, that I came from something where we didn't just regurgitate answers when the teachers asked us but I can vividly remember reciting our multiplication tables in third grade when our teacher held up a card with numbers on it. I had no idea what we were doing. I didn't even know what a "times table" was at the time, let alone what the numbers meant. I just knew my classmates were saying numbers, so I did, too. As you can imagine, I never got the answers right.
I've come along way since those days, but I can still see it in some of my classes even in college. Maybe I'm just biased towards my English Lit classes, but I've never just sat there and had to regurgitate information in those classes (high school, yes, college, no). In my math classes, oh absolutely I had to just rattle back information that I knew. Quadratic formula? Have no idea what it does but I know a song to remember the formula (I think it solves something to do with parabolas, I'm pretty sure?); the formula for slope? Yeah, I got 'chu but beyond telling you "rise over run," I haven't the foggiest. I don't want that for my students. I don't want them to tell me that Mustafa Mond is like a biblical figure in Brave New World, I want them to tell me why they think he is one. I want to hear what they have to say. My students are not my banks to deposit my knowledge. I want them to build their own banks full of their own (and other students') knowledge.
I like the talk about a partnership vs a "student-teacher" relationship. While I feel like Freire is getting a tiny bit dramatic talking about liberation and oppression, I do agree that students will not get much out of their education if there is a "Charlie Brown teacher" standing at the front of the classroom mumbling, Womp womp womp.
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