Chapter 5 of Rethinking

I found this chapter to be very interesting.  This chapter is probably the chapter that has changed my thinking the most so far.  I started out this class and reading this chapter with a somewhat negative perspective on “nontraditional schools” including home schooling and virtual schools.  This chapter however changed my thinking for the better.  It proved to me that these schools can be just as good or even better than our standard public schools.  When students learn in these “nontraditional” ways, they have more control of their learning and I feel like they really get out of it what they put in.  And although my overall opinion on these types of schooling has become more positive, I do still believe that we need both public schools and “nontraditional” schools, because not all students are the same and learn the same ways.  I believe that certain students will do better in each school.  Sometimes the traditional public way is what is best for a certain student, but also there are students who do better with these “nontraditional” ways. 

                As a future teacher, I plan to use this in my teaching to help my students realize this same thing that I realized from reading this chapter: that different students learn better in different ways and different schools.  This is important to me because I remember that as a young student, my classmates and I would often stereotype or categorize all students who were homeschooled as “weird” or “different” from us, and that homeschooling was a bad thing.  As a teacher, I hope to steer my students away from these thoughts and show them that neither school is better or worse, just better or worse for each individual.