Without a doubt Miami University's classes are taught by some of the most brilliant minds in the country. However, when you go to sites such as www.ratemyprofessor.com, all too often the site is flooded with comments from students who feel that their professors are brilliant and great people, but the professor hindered their student's experience due to a lack of knowledge about education. As a senior in The College of Education, Health, and Society, we are taught and given many chances to experience that in order to get students to really learn and be able to think critically about information, it takes more than just a "professor" of knowledge and a student to sit there and soak it all up.
I often hear that students should be able to go to class to get content and take the learning upon themselves at a collegiate level. Maybe this is true, but high schools today are trying to prepare students to be able to thrive in college. By doing this high schools aren't creating learners or thinkers, they are creating memorizers and regurgitators that do really well in college. It is scary to think that tomorrow's professionals are only learning to repeat what the professor wants to hear.
I am not saying that beginning to enlighten more professors in the United States on the latest in education theory is going to fix the entangled web of problems that the nation faces in education, but we have to start somewhere and maybe it will have a trickle down effect.
Ashley Baldwin
baldwiae@miamioh.edu