Recycling the Gift

In the documentary "Recycling the Gift: The Passion Project II," it talks about how  students should be learning in the school enviorment. It tries to put the word out there for everyone who struggles after leaving high school and is expected to be  ready to enter the "real" world. She use the opinion of other people to prove that the way of how we are taught in high school is not enough for the teachers to say that we are ready.There were many things that caught my attention and things I agreed with, but most of all things that I can relate with.

Something's that caught my attention were the things that Jeff Duncan was saying. When he said, "It's not a factory; it's not an institution; it's not a public service; it's a community" (Duncan2). This caught my attention because I liked how he compared school as a factory. Schools should  not be compared as factories because it shows that schools are places where they just throw stuff at you and expect you to be able to do it just to get work done. Another thing that caught my eye was when he said, "...education is the process by which people learn first, to understand themselves, their own value, their own historical place in the world. But if you try to fit them as widgets in a current economic set of needs, it's ridiculous" (Duncan5). This caught my eye because it is something school should be about. Schools should make they're lesson about something that they can abapt to, something they can relate to so that it would be easier for them understand. I left like Jeff Duncan had a lot of really good things to say. He made it easier for me understand they argument because they way his mind thought was more based on how he feels the learning enviorment is like. 

In this documentary the narrator talks about shallow memorization. This is basically how students get throught high school. Something I can relate to because as a student I never really allowed myself to learn the curriculum because I only cared about passing the test. So what I would do was I would study the night before and he say of and try to remember all the answers to a test and the vocabulary just so I can pass the test. Shallow memorization is used a lot with students I believe because it is usually the easy way out. Tim Grudin talks about not being engaged results in not learning anything, "A lot of people aren't engaged, and a lot, I think there's a lot of learning that doesn't happen because of that" (Grudin7). I agree with this because if the students are not engaged, that means that the students are not paying attention. Which comes back to not being able to relate the lessons. Being able to relate to the topics or the work helps students remember and come back to that topic later on. Well at least to me it would be easier because if it can bring back a memory from my own life it would make everyone easier because then I can always think back and recapture that moment. 

Something that is big to me the the enviorment I am in while learning. I find it hard to learn in an enviorment where I am scared of the people I am around. "There's no dialogue going on between the student and the teacher. So, the student just knows that they are going to ask their question, and the teacher is going to say what it is, and that's going to be it" (Neikirk7). This is how I feel like my whole schools life was like. Where I would sit in class and listen and do the work and hopefully pass the class with what I was able to get from what the teacher has said or taught to me. Never did I like having a one on one conversation with the teacher because I didn't want the whole class to listen. Now I know that that wasn't the right what of learning because this whole time I was learning through the banking system. 

This documentary made a lot of sense to me. This explained how students struggle later on in life because it talks about all the problems the teaching system has. Many people do not complain but this is how we do not learn. Because we are afraid to speak up and ask questions.