It is hard to believe that my sophomore year is already coming to a close. It seems like just yesterday I was walking into my WMS classroom to observe and help tutor the middle schoolers. Now, I have a classroom nickname of “Tiger”, I have made so many lasting relationships with many of the students and faculty in the classroom, and I have learned so much about what it means to be a teacher both in the seminar classroom and through my placement.
In the seminar course itself, I have began exploring my first real teaching experiences and abilities, as well as learning and growing regarding how to be the best teacher that I can be. Within the lessons that I have taught, I have picked up on some strengths and weaknesses that I can build on in the years to come. I often talk a lot and run out of time which means I will have to work on how much content I should include in my lessons in the future, while also working on time management in the classroom. I also learned that I have a hard time relaying concepts to a full classroom, and need to work on slowing down and explaining difficult concepts efficiently, but thoroughly. Some strengths that I have seen in my teaching include creativity and enthusiasm. I am very far from being labeled a “morning person”, but lessons are much more effective and enjoyable for everyone in the class (including me) if I am upbeat and excited about the learning. I also think some of my activities (especially the graph shifting activity with the string and the masking tape, which is an area of my lessons that I am most proud of when I look back on the semester) are very creative and can foster some new, fun, and engaging activities in the future. I learned so much through the content in the course as well. One of the biggest takeaways is that math can actually be very fun, and erasing the stigma that “math is hard” or that “math is boring” in my future classrooms will actually benefit student engagement levels and overall learning. I also learned that teaching from the textbook is not that beneficial for students, but rather explaining where concepts are derived from and how things come about it essential for students to understand the problems they are given. This is something that I was not really taught in my experience (I could have never told my class why a negative times a negative is a positive), but can use in the future to ensure my students are understanding the concepts.
Although a lot of learning was done in the Monday morning class, I also learned a significant amount through my visits to WMS. These students were a lot more rambunctious than any class I had been in in my K-12 career, and I learned a lot from the teacher that I was assigned to as to some ways to refocus students and engage them in their learning. Some examples of these practices include: taking a break when I get frustrated to show students that I am overwhelmed and that they need to focus in on their learning (an extremely effective tactic that my teacher used), taking one day off from a challenging lesson to get students to practice skills such as problem solving and teamwork to refocus the class, and to have a variety of different activities. Having many different kinds of activities that can range from individual Khan Academy work, to investigation activities that involve students walking around the room and finding answers to different problems in teams, to individual problem sets and worksheets; all of these activities can benefit any type of student with any style of learning their mind favors. Finally, I learned how to be a friend and be there for students, as well as putting my foot down at certain times when students were misbehaving. I have not necessarily had a chance to practice this skill, but the teacher that I was placed with did an amazing job at this. Students often think that if they misbehave in class the teacher will not like them. This teacher, however, rewarded students’ good work with great kindness and gratitude that would make any student want to succeed. But, at the same time rather than yelling at misbehaving students, she would encourage them to take a break in the back of the room to refocus on the material. This is an amazing and effective tactic that allows students to take themselves out of the situation that they could be misbehaving in, and allow them to quietly refocus by themselves.
Overall, I am so glad, privileged, and humbled that I was allowed to have these experiences this semester, and I hope to return to WMS or WHS one day to see what these students will achieve in the coming years!
