Best in the World (435):
I have been thinking a lot about these four words recently and what they mean to me and I think that I have decided that these words are a lie. Nobody can be the best in the world at something for the simple reason that there is always something more that they can do to further themselves at what it is that they do. For example, Babe Ruth had 714 home runs in his career and was arguably one of the best baseball players of all time, but going just off of the record, you would have to throw in Hank Aaron and Barry Bonds who have both passed Babe Ruth's milestone.
Let's look at a classroom now. How do we judge our students as the best? The simple answer is look at their test scores, but in reality, that means nothing. Test scores do not reflect how much the student has learned or how they react to the opportunities to learn presented in a normal school day. So the simple answer is that its nobody's job to judge students on who is the best, but instead to encourage that everybody does their best.
Unfortunately, the teacher must judge what is the students' best and I feel that there is a bit of a gap here based on the skills of everybody that the teacher has seen in their years of work. A teacher can see a good project and can really tell how much a student put into something. A test really can't do this because students do not have the ability to put in what would make a brilliant project truly brilliant: themselves.
Lionel Messi is currently the world's best soccer player, and if you look anywhere, there are articles that support this. What I think makes him the best is his will to keep going. If you watch a Barcelona game, you can see his want to keep playing, even after the referee's award a free kick to his team. His drive to play on in the game that he lives and breathes instead of taking the easy way out with the free kick makes him the best.
To tie this to the classroom, why shouldn't we encourage our students to just find something that they love and get really good at it? School is the catalyst for students to receive the basic tools (such as math, reading and writing) and run where ever they want with them. I feel that if I get any of my students to follow their dream, then they really can be the best in the world, no matter what measurements or studies about students say.
