blog f

SED 125 and EDU 125 have shown me that teaching will be a challenging job and that it does require work, effort and patience. Yet, they have also shown that teaching is a rewarding experience. Learning about education and about the diversity found in classrooms has made me even more determined to become the best teacher I can be. I want to be like the teacher in Freedom Writers and I want to be an inspiration and get through to my kids. I want to show them that learning can be fun and that everyone can succeed. EDU 125 made me think about what kind of teacher I want to be and how I am going to run my classroom. Before I took this class, I had known that I wanted to be a teacher but I never thought about what it meant to be a teacher. It takes a lot more planning and hard work than I originally thought. Before learning about the philosophies, I would not have been able to think about what I expect from myself and from my students but now I have an idea of how my classroom will run.
I now have a starting point. I know that I want my classroom to be a safe place where no one is afraid to speak and I want my students to learn how to be respectful to each other, no matter the differences. I will not simply force them to learn but will allow them to become actively involved in their own learning through experiments. They will become independent and not dependent on me because I will simply be in the background, their guide should they need one.
This class also made think of what challenges will lie ahead. I have gone to school in a mostly white area, middle-class to poor socioeconomic standing, in a very small town. There was not a lot of diversity. There were maybe 2 black children and 3 Hispanic and a total of about 6 special needs students, many of whom I rarely even saw. As a teacher, I have begun to realize that I might get people with different learning abilities, people with different cultures, races and heritages and that I must be able to teach each and every one of them. Before this class, I had never thought of this but now, I have begun to think about this situation and have been thinking of how to teach everyone so that they all learn.

I think, in high school, when you are deciding your career, it might seem easy. I mean, teaching 3rd graders, how hard can that be? However, what I and probably many of my peers thought was that it sounded easy because, after all, how hard can 3rd grade math be? What I have realized after taking this class is that it is not necessarily the content that is hard but it is explaining how to do it that is difficult. It is always much harder to explain how you got an answer than to just do it out. This is the teacher’s job though. We are expected to know how to break things down so that all the students understand it. We have to be able to teach in a variety of ways so that everyone can succeed. Furthermore, as a teacher, I am going to have to try and be creative so that I never run out of experiements. My job is to teach so that everyone is interested. I have to make learning fun, which is a lot of work sometimes. I also have to learn how to teach subjects that I was never good at, such as math.

I realized, after taking these classes, that there is a lot more to teaching than simply reading out of a textbook and lecturing. It takes hours of planning and decision-making and hours of deciding how to teach in several different ways to become a good teacher. Yet, I know that I will not give up because despite the hard work and the disappointing pay, it is worth it because the children are worth it. All the hard work that you do will be paid in full when you see a smile of triumph and happiness from a child that gets it or even when a child who has struggled finally understands it. All the money in the world could not be better than seeing your students finally understand what you have been trying to teach them.