Secondary education, with a specific concentration in U.S history, American Government and Sociology is my area of interest. I would like to focus on adapting a core of educational precepts with my future students. .
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I would first like to address my belief on human nature. I would classify myself as an ecletic, humanistic with behaviorist tendencies. Although I am not a humanist, I will definitely demonstrate my learning model by a more humanist perspective. .
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Ideally, one would like to think humanity is essentially good, however in my experience, people have demonstrated otherwise. For example, while working with children at the local YMCA, as the Activity Coordinator, I initially gave children the benefit of a doubt, trusting they would innocently do the right thing, this eventually had to change. I found the children began to take advantage of me. .
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One other reason that I can not consider my teaching approach completely humanistic is because of the history of humanity. Open any World History Textbook and you will fine time after time humanity has caused more evil than good because of the naive notion that humanity is essentially good. Simply consider Communist Russia, the goal was to create a utopian society, however, that was the last thing it created, causing more social unrest than ever. .
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I believe in general people really do hope and strive for the betterment of humanity but when it comes to those goals becoming reality it is far from happening. There is a wide divide between ideal dreams and reality. There has been far too many evils done by humanity for me to believe that humanity is essentially good, such examples are the Holocaust, Slavery, and Wars. .
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Although I am more of a humanist than a behaviorist I will still use certain theories from behaviorism. Nevertheless, one aspect of behaviorism I will not be using is the theory that says for something to exist it must be measurable in some way.