A “Good” Student

A “good” student is a student who is able to follow rules and learn course material a certain way and retain certain information from their learning. Now not all students are the same and not every student fits the description of a “good” student. This doesn’t make the other students bad but those other students don’t follow what society believes is the “right” way to learn. Those students who can learn the way society wants them to learn and those considered “good” are the ones privileged. If you can learn the way society wants you to learn then you are a “good” student and privileged because you are able to do so. These common sense ideas don’t allow for students who learn in other ways the chance to learn in their own way. Society has put a label on learning and says it must be taught this way and the students will learn it through this one form of learning. This can cause problems as not every student will learn the same way and take the same points away from each lesson. When students are learning we must be giving them the opportunity to learn in various ways and teach them that everyone learns differently. Since these common sense ideas believe that students should learn certain lessons and learn in a certain way it can make it hard for the students who learn differently or aren’t that interested in the topics being taught and would rather learn about something more interesting and engaging.

The common sense idea that students need to be taught certain lessons and in a certain way follows the same pattern that the students are just glasses needing to be filled. A quote from the reading that stood out was “Sometimes the person filling the glass is the teacher(through lectures or guided discussions), and sometimes it is the student (through discovery or collaborative inquiry), but the goal remains the same: to fill the glass”(Kumashiro, 2010). This quote stood out because no matter what at the end of the day its supposed to be the teacher’s job to just fill the students up with information. Of course, this doesn’t actually work because so many students come into school with previous knowledge that needs to be added onto and in some cases corrected. Again, the idea that the “good” students learn one way and they are just there to have their cup filled is something that doesn’t actually work in the classroom no matter how much pressure society puts on it to work this one way. It also reminds us that the “bad” students might not actually be bad but rather they may learn differently and may just be interested in different topics.