Tuesday, October 28, 2014
When I think back to my past teachers I remember only a few that really left an impact on my life. They are not the teachers that taught me the most material, but the ones who provided life lessons that I still reflect upon years later. I am not saying that learning material is not important; in fact it is crucial. However, I also want to be a teacher that my students think back on. I once had a teacher in my sophomore year of high school. She taught biology; something I struggled with. Oftentimes, I came into the classroom feeling nervous or stressed about the material. However, she made the class feel like a family so if we struggled... we all struggled together. What I remember most are her "talks." She would open up class asking if we had any issues in life we wanted to discuss. The classroom was such a carefree environment that many actually spoke up. She told us how we spend so much time in life worrying about things we will never even have to face in our own lives. She said how if we counted all the hours in our whole lives; we would be astonished on how much time and joy we wasted being sad, stressed, or worrisome. She said things that really left you thinking. I have have had many teachers that I felt like I could connect with outside of the curriculum. I felt as if they saw me as the struggling teenager I was and not just as student for once. This really left a mark on me. One day I hope to be the teacher who students will go to for advice. I can only hope that I will be someone who they think back on and smile about.
I had similar experiences with teachers during my years in High School as well. Not to say that my case has too many similarities to yours. For me it was less about teachers providing life lessons, rather they had to know what they were talking about, both in and out of the classroom. Take, for instance, my chemistry teacher. He was constantly keeping me challenged. There is nothing I hate more than an easy class. That took care of the academic part. For the out of class part there were class periods where the lesson's material would be suspended in favor of a class discussion on how the school was being run. What worked, and what, most of the time, didn't. He gave the students, or at least me, in his class something I'd never had before with another teacher: A respected voice. We were not just teenagers going through life faces in our phones and ear-buds blasting music so as to tune out the rest of the world, and rapidly approaching adulthood.
ReplyDeleteTo him, we were thinking individuals with ideas that were worth being heard and given value based on their merits.Other teachers would never had discussed such topics as how the school should address the different ways to use technology in the classroom, or how the curriculum is changing and what that means not only for us, but for future generations of students.
He didn't have the "it is what it is" attitude that I was able to detect in other teachers. He was a progressive, it was clear he loves what he does because he sees it as a possibility to reach the young people and to make changes to a future which is now more theirs, and ours-the young people- than it is his.
My main goal as a teacher is to be like my chemistry teacher. To realize that I can have a very real impact on the future through what I teach and how I instruct these students who will take whatever lessons I impart with them through their lives and hopefully reflect with fondness about their time in my class.