Thursday, September 12, 2013
Appreciating Educators
We've been talking in class about how respect and appreciation from the students varies depending on multiple factors. For example, these aspects could differ due to inner city schools versus suburban schools. However, I think the most influential factor can be found in the teacher themselves. Professor Glassman mentioned this during one of our first classes and it stuck with me: "You have to know yourself: if you're a yeller, be a yeller; if you have a quiet voice, be that teacher who's soft-spoken but firm. If you don't know yourself well enough to control your classroom, the students can detect that, and they'll eat you alive." If you don't appear in control of the class, the students see no need to follow your rules. My mom teaches a Grade 2 class back home in an area that's not exactly the best area to be in. I remember going to her class for a day just to get a feel for what teaching was really all about. She uses the soft-spoken but firm approach in my opinion and for her class, this works. She might not reach all the students, or if she does, not all in the same way, but the way she spoke about subjects and how she taught the material to her class made me want to be back in Grade 2 all over again. When we watched some of the movie "To Sir, With Love", the teacher tried to gain control of the classroom and the attention of its students using numerous strategies. However, only when he started engaging with the students on topics that they could relate to did they start to respect him as he should be. This article talks about how students must be engaged in order to learn: http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesign/tutorial/strategies.html. Without engaging the students, they might not learn as effectively, but also it's possible that they won't even care about the topics being discussed because they're not enthralled with the way the the teacher is presenting the information. One of the main reasons I want to become a teacher is so that I can have the opportunity to personally affect students at the time they happen to be in my class, but also have a lasting impact on their lives.
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I love that you mentioned what Glassman said in class...you have to own who you are in order to gain respect of your classroom. There are so many different teaching styles and each work for different kinds of teachers, depending on their personalities. It's good for students to have different teachers and experience different teaching styles too, at least that's my opinion. In the real world, you encounter so many different sorts of personalities...so you're going to have to learn how to adapt/learn how to interact with all different kinds of people, so that can definitely be taught in school by interacting with different types of teachers.
ReplyDeleteMy mom is a kindergarten teacher in a "not so great area". Up until this year she worked with two other kindergarten teachers in her school (they passed a level in her school district so the town merged school and now have two big elementary schools instead of 8 little ones...so the kindergarten team for her school had doubled...and she told me today they're hiring a new teacher too...but this is besides the point) she and the two other kindergarten teachers in her school were a GREAT TEAM. They each had three different teaching styles (soft spoken but respectful, loud and authoritative, and my mom was somewhere in between)but the styles all worked. They would also swap classes on some days for different activities...so the students were able to be taught by different teaching styles and learned how to adapt accordingly. I always thought that was a great idea.