February 2018

Dr. Halagao has served on the Board of Education and plays a big part in the policies concerning multicultural education. I had the pleasure of taking her Multicultural Education class last Fall semester. In my prior experience in education, as both a teacher and a student, I felt that the structure of the curriculum was too focused on just giving information to the students, rather than making their learning meaningful. And that is what I learned in Dr. Halagao's class--how to make learning meaningful for the students. And as Kiwanians, we are educators to the children of the world.

The ultimate goal of education should be to prepare our students to become efficient contributors to society. When we use place-based learning and show what they are learning is applicable in real-life, we are trying to instill a sense of civic responsibility into our students. The reason that I want to become a teacher is to give back to the community. And where did I learn this? From my mentors, who were all teachers (both high school and college teachers). And an educator is more than just a teacher. They are mentors, parents, and even counselors. And in order to have a sense of civic responsibility, you have to be a free thinker. If we do not teach our students how to think outside of the box and to look at things through different perspectives, they will always be conforming to society. And this is exactly what I believe Kiwanians do. Through service projects, we are teaching children to not only care for their communities, but to recognize that there are problems and that there needs to be a Call To Action. We also provide leadership opportunities which makes our students feel more involved with what they are doing, and not just having an adult tell them what to do. And lastly, Kiwanis is a place to create fellowships; it is a place where people with similar interests can work towards a common goal. We are educating our children by creating meaningful experiences.

~ Aladdin Roque-Dangaran

January 2018

Test anxiety and the fear of failure is something that every student goes through. I believe that the way the school system has been structured (as far as my education experience), we tend to do everything possible to avoid failure. And when we encounter failure, we start to panic.

During my freshman year of college, I took a general physics course. I ended up with a B, but I remember that the first few exams were extremely difficult for me. During the test, I would hit a ‘mental roadblock’ and could not for the life of me think of how to approach the problem. I would constantly be thinking, “What is going on? Why am I forgetting this now?”

According to Make it Stick by Peter Brown, this anxiety took away from my working memory capacity. Going forward, I began to look at mistakes through a reflective lens. I learned to use it as a tool to focus on the concepts that I needed to spend more time understanding. While taking organic chemistry, I was utilizing more self-assessment as a means of retrieval, reflection, and reconsolidation. When you practice in this way, you learn to “view failure as a sign of effort and as a turn in the road rather than as a measure of inability and the end of a road” (92). When you embrace your failures and learn from it, you are making learning an exploratory process and making it a meaningful experience.

~ Aladdin Roque-Dangaran