PLN 3

Dear Mr. Fisch,

            Your article The Learning Studio attracts to me, because I feel that this is the way that students should be learning today. The methods used by the School of Medicine at the University of Virginia in “The Learning Studio” such as working with groups with a lot of projects in every class that you use. Also what I think is cool is not being lectured then tested directly after the lecture. I think that these ways of learning and teaching would really benefit the students today because if students work together and think as one with their peers today, they will learn this skill now and could use it in the future. I also agree that the lecture and testing style of teaching is not effective because I am a student and I know that when being lectured, all that the information the teacher is saying is doing is going through one ear and coming out the other. Then after not fully understanding the lecture, students cram for tests, which don’t help a student understand the material, and then they just forget about it after the test is over. This learning studio should be the classroom of students today because it would be more effective in getting kids educated and prepared for the real world.

PLN 2

Dear Mr. Karl Fisch –

In your article “Dear Denver Post: No More Horoscopes”, I strongly agree with your negative feelings towards the horoscopes in the Denver Post news paper, and I support your idea for replacing this portion of the paper with science articles. Your statistic about one fourth of Americans actually believing in Astrology shocked me and made it even more evident to me that horoscopes need to be replaced by articles that are logical and supported by science. Isn’t the purpose of the paper to educate readers? I could care less if people looked at horoscopes, but to take away newspaper reader’s source of knowledge and replacing it with garbage makes me slightly angry. If people know more about America’s and the world’s problems, then people would be more knowledgeable about the issues and more inclined to help fix the problems. In the future, I hope to see this change made to not only improve the newspaper but also enhance the knowledge of its readers.