Banking Versus Problem-posing : Is there a happy medium?

             After reading Paulo Freire's piece, I can now explain why I succeeded with some teachers and classes more than others. In high school, I took AP US History as a sophomore, with a teacher I had taken the year before and loved. However, I experienced the AP class in the middle of COVID-19, and as we all made adjustments, so did my teacher's style of instruction. He switched to the dreaded banking education. Online classes became simple info dumps with meaningless facts, and nothing tying them together, mirroring the idea that "...education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories, and the teacher is the depositor..." (Freire 87). As a person who loves history enough to major in it, I am devastated to say that I did not think critically at all in that class. 

    On the other hand, I have had some teachers who go too far into the "problem-posing" education standard. My calculus's favorite response to questions was "Well what do you think you should do?" While these types of questions and responses are fantastic for deeper thought, they must be paired with an appropriate amount of simple foundational facts. As said by Freire, in this situation, "...here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught..." (Freire 93). While this sounds like a great dialogue, I truly believe there are times when a strong teacher is needed. In that calculus class, I cried every week because I felt like I could not get a simple answer to end my basic confusion. The solid roles of teacher/student do not need to be a permanent role, but they might need to be temporary. 

    At the end of the day, as a student, I can completely understand Freire's reasoning, and there are definitely parts I agree with. I do think that there needs to be a happy medium between the different types of education. Teachers are in that role for a reason and should be able to deposit basic facts that can THEN be built on with open dialogue and "problem-posing."