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- Of the courses I took a few that were very impactful were some general philosophy courses
- To me the meaning behind them was profound, they developed your ability to think critically, analyzing situations from various angles and perspectives such as John Rawls’s and his Veil of Ignorance in what society we would create if we knew about how society worked but lacked the knowledge of where in that society we would exist.
These philosophy courses also gave meaning through the introduction of differing perspectives of thought, both of those that you agreed with and those you didn’t. This gave the knowledge that people don’t all think alike and that doesn’t make their viewpoints or angles of perspective more or less valid but that you need to analyze their arguments as well as try to understand where they are starting from and why they think the way they do.
I believe these are important lessons to learn for both us as teachers as well as our students.
- Another two courses that I found meaningful in their dichotomy were my philosophy of ethics and my business ethics courses
- The meaning of both of these courses as per their syllabus’ was in a nutshell to teach ethics and how we should act in our daily lives both at and outside of the workplace.
I found meaning in these two courses in two main ways, the first is the teaching of ethics itself seeing it from its western philosophical origin perspective with many varied and insightful papers as well as seeing it in a more directed method focused on the business community, in running corporations from the small single store operations to multinational companies with tens of thousands of employees.
The other way I found it meaningful was in how it was taught, with the philosophy course inviting you to think, to reflect, and discuss with others while the business course was treated like an imposed technicality to be checked off with rote memorization and regurgitation in which any creativity or interpretation was a fail and passing was about telling the professor back what he wanted to hear as an unthinking return of what was written on the board.
- A course within the education program I have found meaningful is the mathematics course
- I found immense meaning through this original course and its sequel in the perspective of how mathematics was as a subject, how students should be treated, how they should be taught, and how they should interact as a comparison to how mathematics was through all my years of education.
As many peoples have shared similar to my experiences math was always about memorizing the formula and then applying it to long series of problems.
The new course however stresses allowing students to approach problems in their own ways, especially at elementary school levels, to work with and discuss problems with other students rather than solving them alone, and to share ideas on how to approach problems from different viewpoints and with different thought processes that allow a richer understanding of mathematics, alleviating much of the anxiety and boredom the old methods created, and giving students a much richer learning experience so that they can both enjoy it more and keep learning it rather than so many who drop out of the learning experience around mathematics early and treat it as a torture to get through.