PBR Chap 4 and 15

Classroom Management. The chapters focused on what it means to understand and inquiry but what they really wanted to say was classroom management. As i read those chapters, those two words flashed in my mind.
Over my past year, the days that I had the least discipline problems were those days with genuine class discussions about genuine topics (What is faith, reality, homosexual marraige, male and female equality), had discovery activities and when the students were creating something based on their prioor learning. The two chapters stressed the need for true understanding, not just for a test, but in a larger sense where it is internalized, contextualized and intergrated into their world view. In order to achieve this is true inquiry must be made not only into outside sources, but within the individual to see what the concepts or learning actually means in the relative reality.
If both of these processes are occuring, students will be so focused on their own growth and thought that the rest of the world melts away, as noted on pg 231 in reference to the "flow." By having these two processes occuring, many of the issues facing classroom teachers become null and void and the true job of an educator can be realized.
It is not an easy task to do this. I did it few time during the school year but I realized when it happened. I felt like an actual teache. I wasn't tired of managinf kids. Most importantly class didn't end when the bell rang. Students continued to talk into the hall and ask me questions in the following days.
One of the most frustrating days of my schooling was the day I was introduced to the socratic method by Dr. Garretson in my high school theology class. He asked " What does it mean to know." I struggled with this for years. I forgave him for my frustration and now use that with my students, offering a constant opportunity to look deeper into that topic, continuing the inquiry and reaching new understandings that we don't understand much at all.