As I have grown, my education has also moved up through the steps of life.  I started out as a young little boy, living in the suburbs of a little town in Romania.  Through my growing years in life my parents have had a large part in my education and my manners.  I could say that a lot of people have had a major part in my education and some of those people are my teachers.  Teachers are very important to a student’s life, they give the student information and knowledge.  They provide the student with the essential material that a person needs to know in such a complex world.  My life as a learner has many interesting aspects, and all of my teachers from the beginning of my learning career until now have played a part in that.
                 From my first class in school up until now my whole life has been getting an education.  This is the most essential part of life, or so my parents say.  The thing that you need to do is get an education because that decides the rest of your life.  They ask me if I want to work for a living or if I want to stay in an office and have people work for me.  This is what my parents tell me.  Paulo Freire has a very interesting point in his article when he says “education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.  Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.”  This is a very interesting point made by Paulo, I think that many teachers in our schools, teach this way.  And this is exactly what Paulo means when he says “The ‘Banking’ Concept of education.”  I can really relate to this system because I think this is
exactly how I have been learning for the past 13 years of my life.  I have been an empty jar that has been filled with knowledge.  My education is very important, and teachers teaching me what they believe have surrounded my whole life, and I have never been taught to think for myself.  I have always been taught by my teachers, and that is what Paulo says in his article.
                 One way that I have always liked to learn is by getting to do what we study.  For example if I am in a biology class and we are studying fish and wildlife, I like to go out to a river and collect samples and then put it under a microscope and see what is actually living in a little sample from a pond.  I guess you could call that hands-on learning.  I think that is the most effective way to learn. How much closer can a person get then that.  When a teacher just teaches from a book I am not going to be very interested, and in order to get me excited about coming to class I think they need to have hands-on experience.  Life is short go out and experience what you are learning, I think that is the key to an effective learner.  In the article written by Rodriguez, he states that his whole life he has been into books, and never really experienced real communication or socialization with the world.  I think that is a terrible thing to waste.  People are so much fun and I personally think that you can learn a lot more from a person then you can from reading a book.
                 I believe that the teacher makes the subject.  If the teacher isn’t any fun and doesn’t captivate the student’s attention he is a lousy teacher.  The purpose of the teacher is to teach the students and if the students aren’t interested, how are they going to learn?  I believe that any subject could be fun if you have the right teacher to present it.
                 Just by the first two weeks of this class and the two articles that I have read I have learned a lot about myself.  This class is going to be very exciting and informative, I am going to learn about myself, and the world around.  At the end of this year I hope to have learned how to think for myself.  I am old enough and I need to start forming my own opinions about what my teachers say and what they teach me.
                 School is wonderful it is a place where you learn, and where you become more knowledgeable, and yet it can also be a place where teachers teach.  I see school in two different ways, teachers can teach and the students store the information or where the teacher teaches and the students learn the information.  I think that the second way is a better way to learn.  By the end of this year I want to be able to clarify the information presented to me in class and analyze it.  Not everything that a teacher says in class is fact, sometimes they also put opinion into their teaching.  I need to be able to distinguish that.  I like this class because it has such a different style of learning.  It is a way of learning that I have never seen before.  I want to be able to apply what we learn in this class to all of my classes.
 School is important to me because it plays a part in the rest of my life. The way I learn or what I learn will impact the rest of my career, and my personal life.  I learn from school and school is my life, so I need to pay close attention to what my teachers say and be an individual that has my own opinions and my own thoughts.  Rodriguez says in his article “In the sixth grade I simply concluded that what gave a book its value was some major idea or theme it contained.  If that core essence could be mined and memorized, I would become learned like my teachers.  I decided to record in a notebook the themes of the books that I read.”  This statement says that whenever Rodriguez reads a book he would have a main theme that the book contained, instead of forming his own opinion and his own theme that he learned from the book, he took the authors theme, and took it as his own.  This shows that many students are taught to learn like this.  Comparing this idea to Freire and his article it shows that many students aren’t learning by themselves they are taught what to learn.  My life as a student has been like that all along but by the end of this course I hope to have overcome that idea of learning and form my own opinions and my own thoughts.