Self-reflection on Strategies

While watching the videos I realised that nothing is impossible if you have enough motivation and if you find your strategy to achieve your goal. It is impressive that a teenager is able to speak 15 languages; I even think just 5 or 6 are impressive, too. The question lays on what strategies to use and how someone can find them out.

I remember when I was a kid and I had to study a unit for history class. Teachers had always taught us to underline everything we found important. My problem was that I found everything to be important. So, I underlined almost everything with my pencil and my ruler. However, my problem was what to do once I had everything marked. How would an 8-year-old girl study or learn something so as to remember the day of the exam? And I say remember because that is what they taught us, to remember and to “vomit”. Would not it be better to make students understand things? To teach them a great range of strategies so as to let them choose what best suits them? I think this way we would be half-way on the right track. It would definitely reduce the number of drop-outs in schooling. If teachers, parents, educators and governments offered different ways of learning about things, there would not be such an amount of frustrated and demotivated kids who lose their interest on education.

Strategies should be something taught at school, as another subject on the curriculum. They should be aware of the possibilities they have to learn about anything: history, maths, cultures, art and so on. Due to the mixed-abilities classrooms we face it is imperative to have our students motivated and interested by showing to them that there is not just one way of doing things, they just have to find their own way. Students should be taught in terms of social-affective strategies for instance. We must not have young learners who seem to have lost their path in education because they just “do not fit” in the system. Certainly what they need is the system to be adapted to them.