Field Experience as an Aspect of a Training Program - Essay Example

 The Town and Country Learning Center (TCLC) is a community housing that provides interfaces, imaginative, and innovative technological devices to help the neighborhood children to expand their horizons. The open time is from 4 pm to 6 pm, which allows children who live around the center to go and learn more new things when they get off the school, especially the younger kids around the age of 5 to 12, and it is all free for them to come. I think this is an extremely good way to let kids expand more knowledge. According to “Travels in troy with Freire’s reading, it mentions that what we learn in school is limited; for example, in school, I only learnt communication as it is my major, and most of the professors would mainly teach communication knowledge to the children. However, in the learning center, children could learn many other things, such as Yoga, baking chocolate cookies, making muffin, and African dance, which are all things that schools normally do not teach. I am so glad to have the opportunity to come to the learning and engage with so many children. During the learning center, I have experience and learnt a lot in TCLC, such as how to communicate with kids. Practical experience in the real world is a very enlightening aspect of learning which should be experienced by every student, especially those training to work in that very environment (Roberts 20). The practical experience helped put in practice most of the things only learnt theoretically, and this brought about a new perception of the information. First of all, I realized that most of the children love to play, but at the same time, they should be given knowledge and taught through the games. While playing with the kids, I found that most of the kids love to be leaders during the game. For instance, when we were playing the extreme tic tac toe, Zianne insisted to be the judge, and she led all of her friends to stand in two lines with two groups, and stand in the exactly position she demand. In this case, we could use this opportunity to lead children to be the leader and also teach them how to be a good leader through the games. Being a good leader will definitely be superiority in their future, such as in school, and their future career. The experience brought about the realization that games are a good way in which children can be taught, since it introduces knowledge and skills in an enjoyable manner as opposed to the strict and formal classroom situation. It is also during such activities that the unique talents of the children can be identified and natured (Malick 94). Secondly, I learnt that parents should spend more time with their kids. The priority of kids’ knowledge should come from their parents. I know that school is a good way to allow kids to gain knowledge, but indeed, most of the people treat their own kids as their treasure and treat other children not as well as their own kids, and they would also teach the morality and behavior. In other words, the knowledge from school is limited. For example, Davione is interested in rapping hip hop, and some of the buddies from the center would simply implement him to listen to the song. However, most of the hip hop songs will contain many negative words, such as bad word, gun control, war, and sexual discrimination words. In this case, we can think that it is because the kid is not their own kids. This may affect the kid’s lifestyle, as she or he might engage in gang groups or other criminal activities. At one time, there arose a need to play the a music video to a child named Keyauna who wanted to listen to a work song. So we played the music via youtube, and watched the music video together with her. Surprisingly, Keyauna asked us to stop the music and told us that she cannot see this kind of things because her mother does not allow her to see. Then, I suddenly understood that it is because the music video contains some vision which is not suitable for children to see. Therefore, I realized that parents are the one who really teach their kids about morality on what their children should do and should not do. Indeed, it is your responsibility to choose what to do and take care of your behavior. Morality should be taught by early ages of children to avoid exposing children to immorality at teenage. However, according to the reading of “Invisible Inequality” of the language use, low income parents do not really have a good conversation with their children. I feel a bit sad about this because parents are the ones who should really care about their own children. In fact, I have heard that one of the kids from our learning center, who gave a DIY card to her mother as mother’s day present, but her mother did not say much to her kid, and the kids told us the next day. I think this is actually not a good attitude to the kid, since the kid really tries hard to make a handmade card for you; then, they ought to be grateful, respectful, praise, and encourage them to do better the next time. This is due to the fact that kids will be more sensitive on what parents treat to them. Parents are role models to their children, and their influence on the children’s life and education cannot be underestimated, since children take very seriously anything that they learn from parents, something which came out very well during this field experience. More importantly, I have learnt that we should not treat the children differently to an adult. When I started to attend this class, I thought it would be tough for me to go to the learning center, and have a good conversation with children, because I did not have any experience of taking care of children before in my life. Also, in class, we listened to a tape from Professor Camille, and the tape was basically describing on how boring subject does the adult usually talk the same to the kids, such as “how is your school?” Normally the kids do not enjoy on this kind of conversation topic, so I got afraid if the kids do not like me, and I cannot blend with them. However, when I really got engaged with them, I found that they are so smart and have great talents. For instance, when we were having drawing activities, Sofia would love to draw outline around a character first then to fill colors in it, and she told me that this way will be easily to do the coloring part, and she can also fill in different layers in it, and it would look more nicely at the end. And, Keyauna told me that she would prefer to draw pink in a girl character, blue in boy character, and red color for dining table that seems they are dating. These actions really surprised me because I did not expect they would have their own opinion, and this is not much difference to an adult. Also, I actually learnt to draw outline first, then fill in the colors from Sofia, so sometimes, not only kids learn things from us, but we can also learn some new things from the kids. Moreover, Sofia told me that when she grew up, she would choose engineer as her major. Not only because her mother told her to, but also she said this major can find a better job in her future career, and she could earn more money to support their family as well. Our conversation was so mature that I could not imagine that I was talking to a kid. The lesson learnt was that children are very reasonable human beings with a mind of their own, and their views and input need to be taken seriously during the learning process. They should be encouraged to give their views, and if need be, appropriate responses must be given so that the children are encouraged to communicate. Even when their questions look silly or nonsensical, they should not be dismissed offhand, as doing so will kill their anxiety, which is important for learning. I feel very grateful to have attended attend this class and had a wonderful and meaningful experience in TCLC. They changed my asinine thought when I engaged with them. In addition, I realized how different I learnt from just taking lecture class than taking both lecture and engaged with kids in real life. Moreover, I learnt that parent have a heavy duty of defining their children's future. If the children are raised well with proper morals, there are higher chances that the children will be successful in their future career. Failure to raise the children well, the chances are they might drop out of the school and engage in criminal activities and this will definitely impacts the children’s future negatively. In addition, students should be allowed to participate in extracurricular activities in order to learn more about real life. This will allow the teachers to deeply understand their student’s well, and as a result, they will be able to assist them on how to improve on their weakness. CONCLUSION Field experience is a very important aspect of any training program. The main lesson learnt in this experience is that there are some differences between the theory learnt in class and the real life world situation. Even when the description accurately captures the situation, a classroom or book description can never capture the reality as well as a real experience. It was therefore a very enlightening experience for the learner. Work Cited Malick, Mihir K. Talented Children Identification and Education. New Delhi: Discovery Publishing House, 2003. Print. Roberts, Scotts O. The Business of Personal Training. Auckland: Human Kinetics, 1996. Print. Read More