FieldPost 3: Heights High

Paulo Freire challenges my all my thoughts on how someone should be taught. Being directly told information is the usual process I have experienced in my education, especially in history course. Trying to think of another way to get important historical information across without spitting out facts frustrated me because I plan on be a history teacher. The Banking Concept of Education by Paulo Freire explains the process as 'depositing' information into students heads, making them 'receptacle' for teachers words. The easier the student allows the 'depositing' to happen, the better student they are.

Going to Heights High, I was able to observe a history teacher do exactly what I could not think of. Mr. Phisher challenged his students minds with a project to described how the united states law making process works. All without regurgitation text from a text book. He developed a group project for the students to create their own laws. The guidelines were to take a old law and fix what was wrong with it, or create a new law that would better the life of teenagers, and present it in a powerpoint. After their presentations, the class would vote on if the law should be passed or not, the same way congress would. Students were tasked with thinking outside what has already been told to them, and develop a solution on their own. While watching Mr. Phisher, I couldn’t help but to smile as he executed a lesson plan so effectively when I couldn’t even start to think of how to get around The Banking Concept. He got his students truly excited to work on their projects. One group was done with their presentation and asked if they could practice presenting on me. Their law changed the voting age from 18 to 13. This didn’t give 13 year old the right to vote on all issues, but it did allow them to vote on issues such as school funding and what it should be spent on. This was an important issue to them because they felt that their school had not given them that option. With current construction going on at their original high school's location, they wanted a say in how rooms were going to be constructed, and what furniture they would have to be sitting in every day.

Paulo Freire stated “The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their interventions in the world as transformers of the world” (Freire 105). Mr. Phisher’s class was the perfect example on how to teach students without banking information. And challenging laws implemented by figures higher than the students solves Freire concern of “automaton” thinking humans. Observing teachers like this ignite my influence to teach. Witnessing these lessons from an omniscient position in the classroom fills me with a motivation to gaining the knowledge of how to become the best I can be in the field I have always dreamed.