Teaching, No Child Left Behind, And Problems with some teachers

The things that some schools are having to do, because of the No Child Left Behind Act schools are having a hard time trying to meet their standards some schools have come to this in the picture. They are trying too hard to force the students to learn the information in time for the standardized tests.
Something that should be done but not being done in many schools across the county is actually caring about the children. There are some teachers that teach that truly care about their students then there are some teachers who are in it for a paycheck. Those teachers who are just in it for the paycheck have no heart because they shouldn't be teaching because they do not care if the students actually learn anything from them. Many cases they do not learn anything from them. Many of my high school teachers actually cared if the students learned the subject matter but there were a few that expected you to know what you were doing from the very beginning and learn from just reading a book. Many students in school cannot do that because everybody has a different way of learning there is maybe 15% or less of all students who can actually learn from just reading a book. For the rest of us we are left to our own devices trying to figure out what we have to learn. Many students also have no study skills and it really affects the way they learn in the future. When I first came to college I had no study skills what so ever because I never developed them. Now I am getting to the point I am starting to develop them more throughly and learning what to take notes on and what not to take notes on. Because schools are not teaching their students the good study skills that are needed to learn things as they go along in school it is setting back many for that simple fact. If I had the little study skills I have now in high school I wouldn't had as much trouble in math that I did back then. Math has always been a bad subject for me after about 6th grade.
Something else that always help get students learning is making it relate back to something that the students enjoy. For example I had a history teacher in high school and we were studying WWI or WWII and she made a giant board game that took up the majority of the classroom. Another thing that really helped in her class was that she always had small classes. I had her for two classes and both of her classes had less than 20 people in them even though only one of them was taught once a year. But the way she taught made the students get involved in the learning process she was the type of teacher that encouraged wrong answers to help you find the correct one from your own thinking.
By making sure that you understand what you are teaching to your students you can help them develop their understanding of the same subject. You must understand your students and verify that they do understand what you are teaching. A quote from a very famous teacher Miss Frizzle from the Magic School Bus would say "Take chances, make mistakes, get messy."
As a teacher you can't teach a class properly without those three little things. You have to take chances with your teaching methods for example steering away from drill and working with a more constructive approach to teaching. You have to encourage your students to make their mistakes and sometimes you have to get messy to learn what things do for example baking soda and vinegar when trying to describe what happens to a volcano when it erupts. You have to be prepared for everything to happen. By making class fun students are more likely to remember when Columbus sailed the Ocean or even their math lessons by making games the correlate back to the subject being taught and not just drill all of the time.
When it comes down to art and music it is best to just let the students do what they want with it. If a student wants to make a purple cow let them, or if they want to make nothing but dissonant sounds on the piano let them as long as nothing gets destroyed or gets out of hand. I had a teacher in high school who often would have us make fold-ables and teach class through our fold-ables after he would teach us the lesson in an unusual way compared to many other teachers. He was one of those teachers that thought Learning is an Adventure, it truly is because if you factor in all of the students backgrounds and elements they were taught when beginning school you will see that you must work with the clay you are given even if it is full of hair or bubble gum.

Click this link for information on a Volcano project gone wrong but still worked.

Although that teacher miscalculated the amount of salt dough they were going to need for the project the cracks and breaks in the dough made it more of a teaching tool because they could see what the difference between extinct, dormant and active volcanoes. Also the students could see what happens to rock when hot lava hits it because the sides of the volcano they created melted away because it was not fully dry. That is an example of how active learning relates back into authentic learning because they can see what happens with their own eyes and not just imagine it.