Reading the authors" works in this unit gave me a broader knowledge of how children overcome obstacles regarding education and go on to be affluent persons. Teachers made a very notable contribution to this success, pushing the students to analyze, explore options, and to never sell yourself short. Failure was not an option and ambition was at the highest level. If you have goals, somewhere you want to end up in life, all you need is the drive to complete the path. Education is a natural resource waiting to be exploited, and all it takes is one little motivating factor for you to acquire the drive to want to tap into it. .
When I was in my senior year, I took an advanced placement biology course designed to prepare me for the test that if I passed would allow me to use that credit towards college. When I sat down in class the first day, I was told we were going to watch a video. The screen lit up and on came the theme song to "The Simpson's." By the end of the year, we had watched all kinds of movies ranging from goofy cartoons to medical miracles and three-headed people. This is just an example of how Mr. Fluegge's teaching method was definitely not in the norm. He was very liberal when it came to due dates and test grades, and was very much like a college professor in the way he ran his class. If you examined his style deeper, you would be able to see that his teaching methods gave us the capacity to work through the material independently. If you took all of his suggestions to heart, your grades would be good and you would be overly prepared for the exam. He turned out to be one of my best teachers and I learned more from him than I ever though I could. He was not an ordinary educator. Everything he did fell far from the tree of typical. He taught me what critical thinking was all about and why I would need it to get far in life. Don't restrict yourself to being a sponge and absorbing only what words come directly from the teacher's mouth.