Paper 3 Rough Draft

Karen Reeves

Paper 3, “In My Classroom.”

         It feels very strange to think that I have found myself in this position… Me, out of all people was not born to be a teacher. Yet here I am, a high school AP anatomy and physiology teacher fully certified, licensed and ready to go. There is nothing to me more terrifying then high school students, but on the other hand there is also nothing more awkward. So this could be fun. Flash-forward to three hours later… that was a classroom full of monsters, I was totally unprepared, and I’m not really sure what I just got myself into. Maybe this is not the place for me, I think I’ll go write my letter of resignation and get out of town as quickly as possible. Okay, so I must confess that none of the above actually happened, I’ve never been an anatomy teacher and I’ve never had a classroom full of horrible kids (minus the few times I taught Middle School Sunday school at church). What makes someone a good teacher? How do you wrangle in a bunch of obnoxious kids? There’s got to be a way to do it, I’ve known lots of successful teachers. In a class of rowdy students I would bring in real life experiences to help them connect, allow students to express their thoughts while still playing moderator, and treat my students in a respectful, yet disciplinary manner. 

         The first day of school is always an interesting one; it’s typically students against teacher. The way that I’ve seen it done best in the past is to let the students get to know you, and maybe, just maybe you can get them to let you know them just a little bit better. To avoid boredom on the first day seems to be almost impossible, what with the passing of the syllabus, and the incessant need to learn everyone’s name and face. “Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers,” says John Gatto. As a teacher I would try my best to not be bored on the first day, or any day, because if I’m bored and I’m the teacher I couldn’t even begin to imagine what the poor students are experiencing. The first day in an anatomy class I’d bring in all sorts of hands on activities for the kids to do. Something to get them really excited about the class. I had a teacher in high school that let us look through microscopes at different cells; we were able to touch and look at whole lungs, hearts, brains, and the esophagus. The first day of school would be a great opportunity to get the students excited about the material they’re going to be learning about for a semester. Those same materials would then continue to make appearances throughout the year just to keep the excitement and interest the students feel on the first day.

         Successful teaching strategies? Let the students help me, let them have (some) input, and I definitely won’t knock any ideas that they have to help me make the learning environment more successful. What I want to avoid is something that Freire delicately names, “The Banking Concept of Education.” Where the students memorize information without really knowing what it means, why it’s important and what it means to them for the future as well as how it can apply to their past. “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor,” says Freire. Continuing on he says, “Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits where the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.” In my classroom I would try to give students an opportunity every chapter we discuss to come up and try teaching the class something new. Give them a mini research project so they get the chance to learn, the rest of the class would learn, and I would maybe learn something new as the teacher as well. They wouldn’t be huge, time consuming projects just a poster board talking about cell types, the spleen, or something else anatomy related that the individual student wanted to learn. An important part of teaching is to help the student learn how to research and learn for themselves. We, students or otherwise shouldn’t walk around like a bunch of trash compactors with all of this information in our heads and never use it.

         To get respect you need to give respect, this definitely applies in a classroom setting. In an anatomy class there are more than likely going to be quite a few awkward moments when talking about body parts and their functions. In my high school AP Anatomy class there was giggling that happened everyday. My role as an educator is to make the students feel comfortable, to maybe laugh with them, and involve them in my past by telling them stories about my Anatomy days. While also still sticking with the curriculum, and making sure that we stay on track as a class. I would never intentionally try to make a child fail my class, I would however push them to study, learn things on their own, I wouldn’t spoon feed them their education. I believe that you can do all of these things while still offering the students every opportunity to learn from me. As Jerry Large says, “A big part of building character is overcoming failure. Too much adversity is bad, but so is too little, which doesn’t allow a child to build grit.” As a teacher I would behave in such a manner that I would treat the students as my equals, as adults, because as high school students they should be starting to think of themselves that way. I would want my students to see me as someone they can trust, someone they can relate to, and every child needs to be able to believe that their teacher wants them to succeed. Dan Brown agrees saying, “Great teachers have strong relationships with their students families and engage in meaningful ways with the larger community. Going to a volleyball game and cheering your face off can sometimes make a world of difference.”

         As a student I was never a fan of standardized testing, it’s not fun, and the only purpose of it to me at the time was to check and make sure you weren’t stupid, and that your teachers were doing their job. I didn’t pass the math portion of the WASL therefore I didn’t get a t-shirt on assembly day, talk about making someone feel bad about themselves for absolutely no reason. As an adult while I understand it, I still don’t enjoy. I agree with Mike Rose when he says, “… stop making standardized test score the gold-standard of student achievement and teacher effectiveness. In what other profession do we use a single metric to judge goodness? Imagine judging competence of a cardiologist by the average of her patients cardiograms.” As an educator I would do the standardized testing as mandated by the state, but I would educate every student about the testing just to ensure that they know the results of these exams will not make them pass or fail my class exclusively.

         Would any of these things fly in a real classroom? I have no idea. Would I try to implement them into mine if given the opportunity? Most definitely. As an educator I would bring in real life experiences to help students connect with me and with each other, allow students to express their thoughts while still playing moderator, and treat my students in a respectful, yet disciplinary manner.

Work Cited

Brown, Dan. ""What Makes a Great Teacher?"" WJLA. ABC7, 31 Aug. 2012. Web. 04 Dec. 2012. <http://www.wjla.com/articles/2012/08/what-makes-a-great-teacher--79397.html>.

Freire, Paulo, and Myra Bergman. Ramos. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury, 1970. Web.

Gatto, John Taylor. "Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why." Harper's Magazine 1 Sept. 2003: n. pag. Print.

Rose, Mike. "Resolutions Someone Should Make for 2011." The Washington Post. The Washington Post, 05 Jan. 2011. Web. 04 Dec. 2012. <http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/some-2011-resolutions-someone.html>.