Trailing Away From Fixed Education to Expanded Knowledge

     I am the type of person who is opened to learn about almost anything and not just stay focused on one narrow subject.  I grew up in a high school where teachers did not like to teach just what they were given to teach.  Because of the way many of my former teachers have taught me I picked up the joy of having an expanded education.  At the mosque where I teach we have to follow the curriculum that was created through several years of experimenting with multiple textbooks.  Teaching from a given textbook for the whole year, and teaching only from that textbook is something that I am not used to.

     At McCluer North High School there are many amazingly well-educated teachers with great senses of humor and creative ways of bringing multiple ideas and thoughts into the minds of their students.  My teachers were always opened for any topic to talk about in class.  We never learned just what was given in the fixed curriculum.  Random subjects would be pulled out of thin air and thrown into the class discussion.

     My junior year I took Current Events class thinking that I would be learning about current events and the current events in America.  Mr. Trevor Laney was the teacher of the class, and he really knew how to push interest and focus into the class.  He never taught out of a textbook or out of just one magazine or newspaper.  Mr. Laney would bring us Newsweek’s, articles off of the internet and documentaries to watch.  A lot of times the class didn’t focus on just current events.  We were given a lot of history lessons to help explain the current events.

     Another one of my teachers, Mrs. Daniels never even assigned us to text books.  She was our Speech and Communications teacher.  Mrs. Daniels taught a little bit from the class textbook, but a lot of times she would let us learn on our own in our own way.  She would give us a general topic or prompt and have us create a speech to talk about it.  For example, she would tell us to talk about a belief that interests us.  We would have to explain what the belief was and why it interested us.  She always encouraged us to choose topics that we didn’t know too much about.  This helped us pick up a skill to think out side the “textbook” and be open to other ideas.