Background Statement

One of the greatest benefits of teaching is that you can actually tell your students that you’ve been in their position before. I may not be able to relate to exact circumstances but I get the idea because I have been through all the phases of school at one point. But let’s face it, as teachers we would love to say we remember a lot of the great things we were taught or how good or bad a teacher may have been, but what really sticks in our minds are those embarrassing moments or good moments with friends at school. Of course I remember some good assignments and one particular great teacher and a few not so great teachers, but what comes most vividly to me is the social aspects of school. I remember being out on the playground in elementary school waiting in line to play tether ball only to find a bee in the pocket of my corduroys that stings me. I remember the beginning of middle school marked the time that boys no longer had “cooties” and I should now play “footsies” with them under the table. I also remember girls being completely mean and caddy in high school.

Believe it or not, these memories may be the most useful to me as a teacher. No matter what grade a student is in they are going through some sort of change, because kids are constantly growing and changing. We can’t get anywhere with our students if we do not try to relate to them and using our own experiences can be the most powerful tool in doing so. Starting with elementary school I remember having a reading loft in my first grade classroom and if you were good you got to go up in it and read. I think that was a great motivational tool to get students to read. I was taught cursive in the third grade and loved making capital J’s, but now I realize that the only thing I need cursive for is to sign my name, oh and sign a statement on the Praxis II test. Apparently we should have wasted less time on cursive and simply learned how to sign our names. I think the most important thing I learned from my elementary experiences is when I wrote an e-mail to a girl telling her I didn’t want to be her friend anymore. Well, she told her father, who was a teacher at our school and he made me stay in for recess to discuss the incident. Looking back on this incident I believe it is important for a teacher not to get tied up in personal matters at school because he obviously took this situation personally and should have either dealt with it outside of school as his daughters parent or had another teacher deal with the situation. I believe that it is important to leave personal matters such as this at home when being a teacher.

Now, onto middle school, where I really do not know where to start. But, I do feel that the most pivotal aspect of my middle school experiences were the physical and emotional transformations that were taking place in me and in everyone else. My middle school was set up with two teams for each grade and there were wings designated for each grade as well. We had bells and block scheduling and looking back at this from a teachers perspective I believe that I really like this set up. I only vividly remember a few of my teachers from middle school and I think it is because they were the teachers with the most personality. I had a new teacher my seventh grade year, and I was talking when I shouldn’t and she dealt with the situation by putting all the attention on me and the other student. She told us to stop flirting, which is a big no no is so many ways. She embarrassed us by singling us out and for suggesting that we were flirting at a time when the whole boy girl situation was extremely confusing. Of course she felt horrible about it after I cried in the bathroom for the rest of the day but, I will always keep this experience in my memory so I won’t put my own student in a similar situation. This also shows me that as a new teacher I am going to make mistakes but I will learn from them. One great technique one of my middle school teachers used was meditation. She would shut the lights off and have us lay on the floor and she would play nature sounds on the CD player and talk to us in a soothing voice telling us to imagine a place. All the students in my class went along with it and it seemed to be pretty powerful, I think it really helped us to relax and wash away our worries for a few minutes. I wouldn’t mind trying something similar in my own classroom.

Now high school was a little different than middle school. I had more freedom in the classes I took and began to realize which subjects I excelled in. My freshmen year I did really well in my english class, but then my sophomore year my teacher wasn’t giving me very great grades. I would ask him why and he didn’t have any answers that related to my work, only he compared me to the rest of the class. He said it was the best grade in the class. I learned from him that my grading will not be based on every student in the class but will be based on what each individual student is capable of and the progress that they are making personally. After this I was destined to prove this teacher wrong so I took AP Language and met the best teacher in the world. He gave us a lot of freedom in the class and I ended up learning so much in that class and did really well. He discussed my work with me like I was an equal and always pushed me to do my best but at the same time only what I was comfortable with. He showed an enthusiasm for my work and showed that he really cared about his students. Having him as a teacher has really set the bar for me as a teacher and I hope to be a great teacher just like him. I had very mixed experiences during high school and from it I have learned that it is a two way street, you have to take the good with the bad. I think if teachers and other school officials would have been working more collaboratively together then my high school would have been a better place.

I think that my own school experiences shape who I am as a person but will ultimately shape who I am as a teacher. I will look back on my own experiences and base my decisions and actions on them. I will shape myself as a teacher that I would have liked to have while I was in school. I am not going to lie, I have had a lot of bad experiences in school, but I think those will be the most powerful and useful to me at this time in my life. I know how I would have liked the bad experiences to be handled and will always keep that in mind during my own professional career. The funny thing is I stumbled into this career path, but I wouldn’t have in any other way now. I have always had a passion for English and began with English at college. But I soon realized English wasn’t enough, I wanted to share my passion with others and teaching is the best outlet for this. Maybe my own experiences in school are what ultimately sent me down this path, I want to make a difference in my students life because I didn’t have many teachers or other school leaders that did that for me.

I love English and have a great passion for it otherwise I wouldn’t be where I am right now. But the closer I get to actually being out in the teaching world the more I realize that my subject matter is not going to be my biggest passion anymore, my biggest passion is going to be my students. My subject matter is going to mean nothing if I can’t get through to my students. I know becoming a great teacher is not going to start with me but it is going to start with my students. I don’t think I could even begin to describe what a great teacher is or looks like, I just know I want to be one. I can explain what I know about myself so far. I know that I want to understand all my students on a level that I understand which ways they learn best. I know I want my students to feel comfortable with me in a way that they can come to me with anything. I know that seeing my students grow and succeed is going to be the most powerful thing of all. I know that I need to create a comfortable and inviting environment for my students to be immersed in every day that they are in my class. I know that I am going to work with my colleges to create the best learning environment possible for my students. I know that I want to have fun in my classroom. I know that I want to create the most innovative and creative lesson plans out there. I know that creating these amazing lessons will involve help from others and building off others ideas. I know that in order to be a great teacher I need to give one hundred and ten percent of myself to the profession because if I’m not in it completely then I shouldn’t be in it at all.

If I can do all these things I know that I want to do then I will be on the right path to becoming a superior teacher. I don’t think becoming a superior teacher is about living up the the expectations of some all mighty teacher, but it is about living up to what you think is your best and what is best for your students. I do not want to go down in history as some great teacher or even go down in history as the greatest teacher at the school I teach at, it’s not about being the greatest to others, it’s about being the greatest to myself. I want to make changes in the school that I teach at. I have learned many powerful and innovative ways in transforming a school into a better place. Change is good and in order for a school to provide the best education to it’s student it needs to be constantly changing their approach on education. My main concern in teaching is that I will let my flaws hold me back. I fear I will allow my shyness and lack of confidence to hold me back in standing up for what I believe in, and I hope it does not get in the way of getting to know my students.