General education programs attempt to ensure that intending teachers have a sound grounding in the predominant knowledge, attitudes, and values of the cultures in which they are preparing to teach. General studies in history, the arts, science, mathematics, philosophy, ethics, government, psychology, and sociology are common components of this strand.
Specialist subjects involve studies in depth, which qualify students to teach specific areas of knowledge. Literature and literacy, languages, history, geography, mathematics, science, computing, domestic science, physical education, and industrial arts are examples. Student teachers preparing to teach in elementary schools are usually expected to teach a broader range of content, whereas post elementary teachers are usually more specialized.
Education foundation studies include studies of the history of educational thought, principles of learning and teaching, human growth and development, comparative education, and sociology of education. Curriculum and instruction subjects provide units on principles and practice of planning, delivering and assessing learning experiences for students and include such matters as programming, classroom management skills, test construction, individualizing instruction, small group teaching methods, laboratory instruction, and cooperative learning techniques.
Curriculum at Teacher training universities
General education programs attempt to ensure that intending teachers have a sound grounding in the predominant knowledge, attitudes, and values of the cultures in which they are preparing to teach. General studies in history, the arts, science, mathematics, philosophy, ethics, government, psychology, and sociology are common components of this strand.
Specialist subjects involve studies in depth, which qualify students to teach specific areas of knowledge. Literature and literacy, languages, history, geography, mathematics, science, computing, domestic science, physical education, and industrial arts are examples. Student teachers preparing to teach in elementary schools are usually expected to teach a broader range of content, whereas post elementary teachers are usually more specialized.
Education foundation studies include studies of the history of educational thought, principles of learning and teaching, human growth and development, comparative education, and sociology of education. Curriculum and instruction subjects provide units on principles and practice of planning, delivering and assessing learning experiences for students and include such matters as programming, classroom management skills, test construction, individualizing instruction, small group teaching methods, laboratory instruction, and cooperative learning techniques.
Vitamins
Vitamins are a group of organic substances required in our diets in small amounts for growth and nutrition. They are usually found in foodstuffs or taken as supplements. Yet vitamins probably present a wider gap between myth and reality in the layman’s understanding than almost any other area of our diet. Most people have a recognition that Vitamin C prevents scurvy, that Vitamin A is found in fish-liver oils, or that Vitamin D is found in dairy products; many people believe that Vitamin E preserves youth and prevents sterility, or that Vitamin C can present colds and cancer. Beyond this, however, there is still considerable ignorance and widespread myth. The reality behind the common practice of taking vitamin supplements is less dramatic, although vitamins do represent an important component of the necessary human diet.
The word vitamin was formed from the Latin word «vita» («life») and the Greek word «amine», because 19th century scientists believed that they were formed only from amino acids. Amino acids are the twenty essential code elements which arrange themselves in varied sequences or chains to form complex proteins, the basic foodstuff of life. These organic acids (containing the essential ingredient NH2), in conjunction with the nucleic acids (DNA material being composed of the four bases adenine, guanine thymine and cytosine), «translate» the genetic instructions from the DNA of the chromosome to the RNA transcript, and in turn transfer these instructions from the transcript to proteins.
- Practice at Teacher training universities
Providing actual teaching experience in real school situations (the practicum) is one of the most challenging tasks for planners of teacher education. Traditionally, in the elementary school context, the student teacher was placed with a volunteer school teacher and would be assigned lessons to design, prepare, and present under that teacher's guidance. Usually these lessons would number about three per day, after an initial period of orientation and observation, for about three weeks each year of the program. The teacher would provide feedback on a selection of those lessons but, in order to develop confidence and independence would not be present for all of the lessons, especially toward the end of the period of practice teaching. The college or university in which the student teacher was enrolled would usually appoint one of its own faculty to supervise this process and that person would visit and observe the student teacher on several occasions and would have the responsibility of reporting on progress and awarding a grade, after discussing the experience with both the student and the cooperating teacher. Student teachers would often have other assignments to complete as well as those involving face-to-face teaching.