The phrase ‘commonsense’ has many different types of meanings and ways that people use this common phrase in an everyday setting. When I think of somebody explaining ‘commonsense’, it usually means that somebody is using the knowledge that is used by most of the other population. An example of ‘commonsense’ can be something like looking both ways before crossing a street or washing your hands after using the bathroom to stop the spread of germs. Although these are commonly used practices for most people, some weren’t shown that as a child or don’t think that it is important. ‘commonsense’ can often change between the region or place that a person is visiting so the knowledge of ‘commonsense’ is often very deferent to people.
The reading for this week named “The Problem of Common Sense”, goes through the time and experiences that a teacher had taught in Nepali. The teacher explains that the ‘commonsense’ that was used in the American schools were not going to work in Nepal. The students and teachers did not have the known ways of thinking, learning, and teaching as the American schools did so the whole knowledge around ‘commonsense’ in teaching was not being used. She defines ‘commonsense’ as the way that information should be passed on from the teachers to the students and the steps that should be taken when following the curriculum and introducing the knowledge in an orderly fashion to engage learning.
After learning about how she has dealt with how ‘commonsense’ can change with the different groups of people and the regions, you have to adapt the way that you are teaching students. As she stated in the reading that she has students complaining to the other teachers and telling them that she was going to wreak their school years and make them fail because she was teaching differently than other teachers. Although the teacher was teaching the way that she had been taught to teach students, she should have communicated with the other teachers to see how it is commonly taught. Instead of causing a dispute between who is wrong and who is right, she could have tried to adapt to the way the students had already been taught.
Throughout my time at the university and the education classes that I have taken, I have learnt that you need to be flexible when receiving and relaying information. With a big idea of the class being how ‘commonsense’ is used by educators, I think it’s important to be open to teaching in different ways and taking the time to understand how somebody else is using the curriculum and how their pedagogy is different to yours.