Reflection on Ramsey Musallam Speech

Listening to Ramsey talk about the learning process made me think critically about how I approach lesson plans. Though his speech was more focused on science, parts of his talk definitely resonated with me as I plan to teach humanities.

I rarely had experiences of inquiry based learning when I was in high school. I enjoyed English (and eventually majored in English), but there wasn't really any real life applications. I really just enjoyed reading in its own static little bubble, and it wasn't until much later, when I was in college, that I began to see what language arts skills could do in the real world.

As a result, as an English teacher, I want to provide a teaching experience that presents students with real life urgency -- not just setting up lessons that get students to aggressively seek out knowledge for themselves, but to also give that learning a real world urgency, as if their lives depend on it (and as I am teaching from a social justice lens, it's true).