Taking
SED 407 this semester has been really unique. We had class on a school bus for
one thing. But besides this, SED 407 also offered something that I was not
expecting when I enrolled, an almost completely observation based class where
instead of the traditional read for homework and do this assignment, I was able
to observe students and learn by seeing how they learned and how they
interacted with the teacher, it was a more natural way to learn because I was
making real world connections and coming to various realizations rather than
saying, “well, if the book says so, it must be true.” During this time, I have
learned a number of valuable things, a number of which I couldn’t learn from a
book, for example, teenage students love stickers, candy and any other little
prize a teacher gives for a job well done. Through the teaching of my two
lessons, I learned that sometimes, if a student refuses to pay attention, in
certain circumstances, you just have to let it go so that you can teach the
other students who are, as tough as that may be. There are two particular
things that I learned during this semester that have really stuck out in mind. The
fact that in order to be a good educator, you not only have to know your
content, but also your community, and that in order to be able to teach every
one of your students, especially in an environment like District C, a teacher
has to be flexible, differentiated and able to interact with every student
personally.
As a
future teacher, I have come to the conclusion that when I get a job, wherever
it may be, an affluent, wealthy, prosperous town, or a poverty stricken, high
crime rate inner city, it is very important that I learn about my community.
After attending the Kids Count seminar, I was surprised at some of the
information that I learned about poverty rates, teen pregnancy and crime rates
in the big cities in RI, and I think a teacher who teaches in one of these
cities, and doesn’t know about this, or pretends it doesn’t exist, is not going
to be able to teach effectively. In order to know your students, it is
important to know in what kind of environment it is that they live. If a
student comes into class with a black eye, is it because they were messing
around with a friend and ended up catching an elbow to the eye, or were they
jumped on their way home from school yesterday by a gang for their wallet? A
teacher should visit the stores in the city or town they teach in, drive around
for a while and see how they feel and connect it to their students. Besides
getting to know the town they are teaching in, it is very important to get to
know what the home life of the students is like. Visiting a home not only
allows a teacher to meet parents and speak to them, but at a more simple level,
a teacher can look around and see what kind of house a student lives in, is it
a nice, big house, or does the student live in a small one bedroom apartment
with five relatives? I don’t mean to make students sound like objects, but it’s
important to know what a teacher is working with, students are our material,
not just the content we learned in college, and knowing what their life is like
can give us answers to questions that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to answer.
Being a
teacher requires a person to have a lot of characteristics and abilities. A
teacher has to be a mentor, tutor, instructor, authoritarian, they have to be
approachable, respected, smart, patient, among a number of other things. The
most important thing to be, in my opinion, is flexible, and by flexible I mean
a teacher has to be able to reach out to every one of their students. During my
observations at District C, I saw a math teacher speak Spanish to her students
in order for them to understand the lesson. Her Spanish wasn’t great, but that doesn’t
matter, what matters is that she used that skill to include the students who didn’t
speak English. In this way, a teacher should know if the city they are teaching
in has a predominantly Spanish, or Portuguese, or Italian student body. A
teacher has to be emotionally flexible as well, I saw a teacher who handled a
student argument by threatening to call the fathers of the students, then when
another student was acting out, she went over, crouched beside the student and spoke
to them one on one to see what was wrong. There has to be a flexibility in
terms of student treatment. In a classroom with 20 students, sometimes the
teacher has to be able to handle a problem 20 different ways in order to get
the desired result. Flexibility in instruction is vital, not every student learns
the same. This was made clear when we saw the panel of student speak about what
they liked and disliked in instruction. Some liked packets…some liked group
work, there has to be this differentiation in teaching if every student is
going to be included.
This
semester has really affected me as a future instructor, it has given me a number
of tools and ideas that could only come with in the field observations, not
from a book. If I had to pick something that disappointed me, I would say that
I could have perhaps spoken more to students, during my observations I didn’t
really want to interrupt the lessons, but when I did speak to students, the
info they gave me was amazing at times because that’s probably the only way to
get real, uncensored, raw information about what it’s like to be a student at
the High School, it has to come from the students themselves.
