Teachings, Preachings, and Other Reachings

13) What makes a teacher successful, and who should be the judge of that success, and why?

A successful teacher knows how to reach her students and make the learning experience fun and enjoyable.  Teachers can use activities and different models of intelligences to help students learn material in a more adaptable way so each student has a personalized way of learning.  The ultimate judges of a potentially successful teacher are the students.  They are the ones who have to endure the teacher’s lessons daily.  When a test comes up, the preparation that the students undertake and can retrieve during the test is an indicator of how well the teacher herself prepared the students.

16) How do you plan on putting your teaching philosophy into practice?

My philosophy revolves around focusing on the student, the parent(s)/guardian(s), technology, and the educational process that, in turn, revolve around the relationships of the aforementioned.  I intend on treating students with respect and being a positive adult role model for them in their developmental years.  Likewise with parents, I intend to treat them as adults and will try not to be condescending to them (as some of them don’t have a college education).  As for technology, I believe in learning the material first and then use technology as a TOOL later on.  Calculators and computers, while great resources to drive students’ interest in mathematics, can “help to hinder” the overall knowledge learned because the student(s) would not otherwise have the opportunity to make the concepts personal to them.  They learn in different ways, thus, the conceptual learning will be personalized to them.

22) On any given day, if a stranger entered your classroom, what would they think about the learning environment you create? What would it tell them about you as a teacher, or your relationship with your students?

I would want strangers and other passersby to think that I have a fun,  spontaneous, and positive personality towards the learning experience in general.  I don’t believe in having a stressful environment in which students would be able to learn in because it would allow students to shut down and deny the learning to take place.  I want to create a peaceful, serene, yet energetic classroom in which students are able to find information per their needs and not feel embarrassed for this want of knowledge.  School is the time to learn, make mistakes, and build on already known knowledge.  I don’t ever want to take away from that.

As a teacher, I want to give much of myself to sharing my love for mathematics and learning in general.  While my way of learning will be much different than many of my students’ ways of learning, I will have to be able to cope, adapt and be flexible, and be patient as I learn the ropes of being a teacher, all the while catering to each of my student’s needs.

My relationship with students would be professional relationship, much like a boss and employee, but more so on a personal/one-on-one basis where I have the opportunity to know each student by name and know what their general interests are.

19) Name 2 topics in your discipline that you are excited to teach and tell us why.

I thrive on attention-getting techniques, specifically techniques that motivate the students to work together in a cooperative group and create a great finished product.  Calculus is a great subject for this.  When students first learn what slope is in algebra, they’re given a formula: [slope = m = (y₂ – y₁)/(x₂ – x₁)].  In calculus, this formula is expanded upon and the students take to a different view of slope, namely, the derivative of a function.  One reason why I’m excited to teach this topic is it opens the door to many activities that the students can actively engage in and get hands-on experience.  One of the very last projects that my high school calculus class undertook was surveying different elevations of land around a creek and then determining the slope from the data.  I would hope that I can do something very similar with a class of my own.

My second topic is just on the flip side of slope…area.  This involves taking the integral (or anti-derivative) of a function.  This is expanded from geometric area formulas, such as for circles, triangles, rectangles, and all the other shapes you’re familiar with.  Once students can connect the two concepts from geometry and calculus, it should be apparent that calculus is a beautiful mixture of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and just as much, arithmetic.

10) As a Future Teacher, What Do You See As Your Main Weakness(es) and How Will You Work On Improving This?

2) Why Do I Want To Be a Teacher?

From the very beginnings of my memory, I've wanted to be a teacher.  It's one of those things that has simply been in my blood for as long as I can remember.  I could probably think of numerous reasons that I could really support the answer to the question:

1) I was a little on the bossy side growing up- but no one really listened to me.

2) In my earlier years in life, I was confident that I was better than everyone else (which has since turned a near complete 180).

3) I believe in a fair and just education system where every student has the right to an education, regardless of race, gender, age, socioeconomic status, etc.

Whatever the fancy reasonings behind the answer, the core reason goes back to the whole "I was born with it" ideal, the fact that I'm convinced that I was born to be a teacher.

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