The Central Dogma

Welcome to my inaugural blog post which will begin a discussion on the development of my personal philosophy of education. I am planning on teaching science and/or history to 7^th through 12^th grade students and this chronicling of my beliefs about teaching and learning is an attempt to help me better understand what I want to achieve as a teacher.

So to become an effective and competent educator I have to learn the best approach(s) in transferring what I have learned and know to my future students.

What is education? Education, as I view it, is the flow of information from one source to another.

Since science is what I intend to teach I will use the central dogma of molecular biology as an analogy to explain the process of how I want to transfer knowledge. First the central dogma explains that DNA undergoes transcription to RNA which undergoes translation to form proteins. That’s the simple definition.

DNA is what I have already learned, and will still learn, and I have to determine how to transcribe that information in ways that would be best for my students. So the result is what I will end up teaching or RNA, which is similar to DNA but is best for the translation to form proteins. The crucial part of this process is making sure to translate what I teach to gain meaningful results.

DNA à What I have learned

Transcription to

RNA à What I will teach

Translation to

Proteins à What the students will learn and use

Just as the central dogma isn’t entirely unidirectional I fully intend on receiving feedback from my students, the most valuable feedback an educator can get. One goal, if not the main one, is to help develop and add to a student’s powers. Receiving an education makes a person more and more powerful and with that power anything is possible.