Weekly investment

Are questions the same?
The answer to that is no. Or at least it should be. Whenever you are asking your students questions they should not be expected to have the outcome of just a yes or no answer. Sure, sometimes a question may be posed that only requires a short answer. However, it is important to ask questions that really make the students have to think and dig into what they need to know out of a class. Questioning should be used as segues to transition smoothly from one topic to another while you are teaching in a class. When looking at Bloom's taxonomy I feel as though we need to be asking questions to students throughout a class that touch on each part of these orders of thinking.
It's always good to have an answer to the why we are learning certain content in class. I believe though it's even better when you ask the right questions to have the students realize what the why is without you having to tell them directly (however you should still be able to answer the why directly if the need arises).

Student connection!

When students can not relate to what's going on it's hard for them to grasp a concept most of the time. It is also hard for a student to become interested in a subject if the teacher isn't engaging with them. It's easy to just stand and lecture at student's for the allotted time that you have to teach, but are you really teaching them? students that get lectured at are going to get bored and gaze off into space. they're going to fall asleep and direct their attention elsewhere. when there is no interaction between the students and the teacher, the students are not going to immerse themselves into the content the way they should. This will also make it difficult for the content the learn to stay in their long term memory. With all this being said though, this is why I'm thankful for taking the career path as an Agriculture educator because it's easy to get students engaged with all the hands on learning that is required of this subject area.

Student passions

I personally believe that it's sad that we kind of file our students into curriculum that doesn't interest them. I understand that we need the core subjects for some fundamental knowledge, however I think we need to do a better job in our schools on encouraging students to pursue their passions. No one person is the same and we as educators need to realize that. If we allow students to pursue their passions early on in life could you imagine how knowledgeable they would be able to be in that area? Passion allows for intrinsic motivation to occur and it is amazing too see people talk when they are passionate about something. I believe we should fuel that passion instead of filing students into a line where we expect them all to turn out the same.