Week 1: Diffendoofer Day Book

 The Dr Seuss book "Diffendoofer Day" directly calls out our education system and what it values, memorization and conformity. It challenges this conformity by presenting Diffendoofer School, where children are challenged to think and form their own ideas and it allows these children to succeed. In my future classrooms I hope to challenge my students to think for themselves, but in order to achieve this I need to think deeper into "what does it it mean to be able to think?". 

When I approach the idea of thinking my mind goes to critical thinking, but that still brings up the question of "what is thinking?". I believe thinking is the formation of ideas and opinions based off of your prior knowledge. Thinking is where people form their own ideas and question the world around them. In a classroom setting they don't need to memorize information to pass a test, but are able to comprehend, apply and think through a problem. 

To create a classroom where my student's think, I need to start by teaching them how to think. This is something we don't think about to often, if ever at all. I feel that this goes back into the learning environment the teacher develops in their classrooms. A learning environment with no judgement, so answers are correct as long as you can reason them. Instead of write or wrong, black or white, students are striving for the most correct answer. This is also taught through how a teacher interacts with students. If a teacher is just telling student's answers to concepts they are not thinking about it. Instead the teacher needs to question the student and allow them to negotiate with their prior knowledge to learn. In this type of classroom the student's voice is front and center and the teacher takes on a supportive role to help them guide them to where they need to be. 

Going back to Dr. Seuss's book, through out my schooling I had teachers like those in Diffendoofer, but most of my experience was like the student's in Flobbertown. As a student my job was to spit out the memorized answer they wanted to hear and this doesn't make learning fun. The classes I loved and learned the most from were those that allowed me to think. These include those with my 5th and 6th grade teacher Mr. Motz who allowed me to question the world around me and discover ideas on my own fostering my passion for science that has continued to this day and all of my Science Education classes so far. These classes do a good job of balancing freedom, questioning and allowing student's to discover ideas and concepts for themselves. Hopefully we can move to a world where our schools are all a little more like Diffendoofer and a little less like Flobbertown.