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Individualized Instruction Essay

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Since the American public school system has existed, it has mainly served as a facility that distributes facts in bulk to a wide variety of students. In the past century, the school system has changed from one-room schoolhouses to diversified curricula covering hundreds of topics, offering students choice on which classes he or she wants to study further. However, given the fact that every child learns dramatically differently from one another (Felder & Solomon), it is obvious that something must be done to adapt to each child’s individual learning styles. Teachers need to adjust from teaching for memorization to teaching for comprehension. They need to instill a love of learning in our youth, otherwise, we will lose the driving …show more content…

We never watched the actual video in class, however, because the school district had put a superfluous filter on school communications through the Internet. Our teacher could not circumvent this filter due to the bureaucracy of the school district. The government has emplaced a “Don’t ask why, just accept it” policy on the teachers, making sure they stick to standard curricula instead of adopting their own (more effective) teaching styles. When we force teachers to teach a certain way, we overlook students as individuals, envisioning them as statistics. We place unrealistic expectations on teachers, increasing their workload while limiting their freedom.
With the No Child Left Behind Act, we have opted to reform education by making sure everyone reaches their “highest potential” by limiting teaching to strict guidelines for standardized testing. Gone are the days when school instilled a love of knowledge and learning in students. We have replaced it with a compulsory memorization-based curriculum from which nobody benefits (Schaeffer). Having come from “gifted” education back down to public schooling, it became increasingly evident that teachers tried hammering ideas into students’ heads instead of presenting it in a manner for students to grasp independently. The problem is, this isn’t the teacher’s fault, because from the beginning, we teach students for memorization instead of

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