final essay

Final Draft

Writing 1A

10/12/2018

Project 2

Learning is fun

Susan Engel hits the Nail on the head when she talks about joy as a subject that schools lack. She highlights how, in one way or another, we are eating the children by forcing them into school and education instead of showing them how important and enjoyable it can be to read, learn and discover. She uses the example of a child discovering how hard it is to sink a cup in a bath tub, and how much fun the child has while he is concentrating on getting the cup in, and allows us to see how, learning is actually fun to a child until the child joins school, and the whole aspect of learning changes. She compares that way of teaching and gives and example of how, learning has now been turned into a feeling of eating bitter herbs that are good for you, in my own words.

The concept of child education as the writer mentions should be likened to food. Food is something each and every one of us enjoys, the feeling of ones hunger being filled with food is something to look forward to. The same approach should be given about education or the intake of information. I am not sure how this would be done, but, creating an appetite for reading may and can be started early. In Asia, children are taught from a young age about respect, honor and loyalty. They are taught of loyalty to country, honor and respect to superiors. This is seen from a tender age, because even the parents themselves do the same to their superiors.

The best idea from the article by Engel is on making learning joyful. Most times, when children go to school, they come from a world of self-discovery to a world of directed growth. They come from playing with bugs, and sticking pins into leaves to sitting down close to 8 hours a day, being screamed at to be silent. They come from freedom to a prison in my opinion. For most part, kids don’t scream hurray when told it is time for class, but they do when it is time for break. This is because class is not fun, and there is no topic or course of joy. That stage that someone was free to learn, explore, make mistakes, get dirty, and the next day, do it all over again, is what most people miss having or doing, only in a ‘more mature way’. Some teachers see this, and wish they could make learning fun, but they’re pressured and in one way or another convinced that “pleasure and joy are the enemies of responsibility and competence.” They therefore end up following the norm, until they become numb. In the first article that we read before, the author says that “ A look at what goes on in most classroom these days makes it abundantly clear that when people think about education, they are not thinking about what it feels like to be a child, or what makes childhood an important and valuable stage of life in its own right.”( Engel 4). This quote says that in most classrooms in schools, educators are not focused on children’s happiness they need to enjoy during childhood. Children are born with curiosity, at the age they are ready to learn in school, they are curious about everything they saw. So educators should not only teach children how to study facts but instead lead them with true pieces of knowledge to discover.

In my childhood, I had the pleasure of being taught by the best teacher in my history of education. He taught me math in a way that no one had before. He used to teach us songs that ended up being multiplication tables, simple drawings that taught us how to subtract and we would spend most of the class running around the class counting and screaming number songs. If we knew that we had math class after break, we would all be in class minutes before the bell rang. If we had math before class, we would continue learning even after class was over, because there was so much joy in learning that Chun, my best friend was the plus sign. We would write numbers on our heads and get asked of a math question, while the answer was on your forehead, and it would leave us in stitches. This was and is how school should be.

The author mentions that decades of research have concluded that kids need to want to learn in order to acquire skills and real knowledge in their schools. While teachers are busy pushing joy out of learning because it gets in the way of hard work, they fail to realize that joy and good emotion helps children understand better. The fact that human beings usually seek joy in everything they do means that even children who are busy in school trying to learn need to find pleasure in their learning in order to become better, and take on the world in a more cheerful manner. Solving problems doesn’t need a serious face, as much as it need to be solved by people who love solving them, otherwise, I don’t think we give our best into something when we are not having fun doing it.

In conclusion, from my own experience, and supported by the author, I feel that education should take a different tangent. That the way in which children are taught should change to a process that shows them how to have fun learning, discovering, solving problems, accumulating knowledge than how fun and joy is bad for learning. Once we are able to do so, we will have revolutionized learning and will have a people more learned and more avid in doing what they love in the world.