In Mr. McClung's post, What I Learned This Year, he summarizes some of the things he learned during his first year of teaching at the elementary school level. He touches on points such as reading a crowd, being reasonable, and never stopping learning.
Mr. McClung's first point of his reflection was how he learned to read a crowd. He states that during his college career he became so focused on the content of the things he was to learn and write about that he lost touch with the fact that when he became a teacher the lesson no longer involves only him. I thought about this for a few minutes and realized that is exactly what I do when I write a paper. I forget that what I am putting on paper needs to be directed at an audience that may know nothing of the topic I am trying to write about. When we become teachers we have to be able to make our lessons understandable to our audience. Students are most likely learning what we are presenting to them for the first time. It is paramount that we remember our audience when creating our lessons.
Another of Mr. McClung's points was that we have to be reasonable in our expectation of our students. We must remember that our students are learning the things we've already learned. I have had an experience once before, when I was coaching middle school baseball several years ago. At the beginning of the season I got frustrated that the children I was coaching had a tough time grasping concepts that I thought were simple. It took me several weeks to realize that these kids had not had the experiences that I had already had. Once I grasped this concept I was able to be more help to my players, as opposed to being just mad at them for not being able to do what I thought they should have been able to do. I was able to use their mistakes as learning experiences that would make them better in the future. In the process my stress level decreased, and both the players and I had more fun and won more games.
The last point of his essay was to never stop learning. He said that we expect our students to learn everyday, so we should do them a service and continue to learn as well. We owe it to our students to be open minded towards new ideas and ways of doing things. We should make it a goal to learn something everyday from our students, our peers, and our superiors. We don't know everything!
I will save this post to take a look at when I become a teacher so that I will not forget these valuable lessons. I'm sure that between now and then I will lose touch with some of these concepts, and I want to be able to reflect on them when I get into a classroom.
I agree with you Michael as teachers we often forget to structure our materials towards our students. Also, I am going to try and meet your goal to learn something new everyday. Learning is a never ending process and for our students sake we should always be open to learning something new.
ReplyDeleteYou did an excellent job on discussing the post that Mr. McClung wrote. He had excellent points and this was a very valuable post for us to read as future teachers. I like how you talked about how we owe it to our students to never stop learning. This is something that we will need to remember. They our relying on us for their education and it is our job to give them the best that they deserve and with that we don't ever need to just stop learning new information.
ReplyDeleteI like how you added an experience of yours that helped you along the way. It is easy to get frustrated with someone when they don't seem to understand what we are trying to teach them. I have decided that when this happens, I will try to teach it another way. Whatever we can do to help our students succeed because they are our future.
Hope you enjoy the rest of the semester!
You are so right about making sure your students will be prepared to understand what you are going to present. I have found that if I have a BIG lesson coming up-- one of those slightly more complex, but way more fun kind of lessons-- I will spend fifteen minutes ahead of time (a couple days) just testing the baseline knowledge. I usually do it with some kind of short trivia game, question response with individual white boards, or blanket asking them... That way you will be better prepared to prepare your lesson accordingly!
ReplyDeleteHi Michael,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your post. You really put all the main points of Mr. McClung's post into great detail. I really liked what you had to say about being reasonable with the expectations of our students. I took a class once with an excellent teacher who was very smart. Her only problem was that she expected us to grasp what she was saying or skip steps because she knew how to do it and expected us to. This was a Calculus class and it was indeed very difficult to do. Eventually, it was brought to her attention and she changed. Then she became a fantastic teacher. I think that like you said, we are used to doing things for ourselves, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that we are not only trying to better ourselves, but our students as well.