I know and understand my beliefs, but I seriously struggle converting my beliefs regarding the connection between teaching and learning into words. In short, I feel that teaching and learning are technically the same thing.
Let me start by coming up with a quick definition for teaching and learning. Teaching is the process of getting someone to learn. Learning is developing new abilities.
How does one learn? Learning is up to the person who is learning. Such a person must take resources and provide the effort to translate those resources into the ability to accomplish the task. The learner must provide motivation and effort toward learning.
The only person than can properly teach you anything is you. A “teacher” in school can’t provide your effort, make sense of the resources for you, force you to understand, or succeed for you at accomplishing something that you had never done before. It is ultimately your responsibility to take resources and convert them into something that teaches you anything.
This is where the explanation really gets tricky. Teaching is essentially the process of getting yourself to learn while learning is essentially the process of teaching yourself. Each individual component to teaching is part of the learning process, and each individual component to learning is a part of the teaching process. The actual elements of teaching and learning are identical. If every single component of these processes are the same, then the processes themselves are the same.
Some students may take the motivation of grades and utilize resources provided to them by the schools. In the end, they are still teaching themselves. Unfortunately, “teachers” insist that they are the ones who are ultimately responsible for teaching children. As a result, teaching and learning have both become highly inefficient, undesirable, and even restricted. We need to realize something that the schools won’t tell us. If we are prohibited from learning on our own, we will not learn.
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