Empowering Education by Ira Shor

1.) "He urged teachers to encourage students to question their experience in school: You must arouse children's curiosity and maker them think about school."
I chose this quote because I believe that this is the best way to make kids like being in school, and chances are that if they like being there they'll probably learn better. I find this a lot in the classroom where I volunteer. The students are all five or six years old and trying to teach them anything without entertaining them is like the impossible task. They don't learn anything from formal instruction, but as soon as you turn that same lesson into a game, or make it a question based lesson, where the students control the environment, you can see their little gears turning and you know they must be learning something.

2.)"Students are people whose voices are worth listening to, whose minds can carry the weight of serious intellectual work, whose thoughts and feelings can entertain transforming self and society."
I really liked this quote because I believe that our society as a whole doesn't place enough value in the minds of students. This article is all about having education derived from the minds and questions of students, and if no one is able to value the ideas of a student there is no way that this learning tactic can be used.

3.)“The teacher is the person who mediates the relationship between outside authorities, formal knowledge, and individual students in the classroom."
I LOVED this quote! as future teachers, I think that we all have this idea in our heads of what we'd like to be. I have never pictured myself to become the type of teacher who is holding the bucket of knowledge over my student's head and just dumping it in. Instead I see myself (hopefully) being able to be more like what this quote is describing.

Overall I thought that this was a good article, a little long, but still good. I was easily able to see why this article related to our class because this is what we have been doing all along! I now see why our classroom was run the way it was, because this is the future of learning.