Prompt Question 7

This experience is the ultimate tool for shaping a teaching identity.  For one, this experience is one that, if not for VIPS and this class requirement, I would not have experienced.  I am working towards education at the high school level, and have attempted to avoid the school aged children as much as possible.  The relevance and importance of involvement in an elementary setting has made itself clear to me through the time spent in my location, and will greatly impact my teaching as a high school educator.  At this level, children are willing to tell you just about anything, so I'm learning through first hand experience the issues that many students come to school with.  After this experience, my teaching identity will be one of a significantly larger amount of compassion and understanding. I will make an effort now to make myself culturally, and demographically aware of the makeup of my students, and be sure to be informed of ways to deal with the issues that come with that area, and the options that my students have. 

One of my students that particularly struggles in mathematics reminds me alot of myself.  He never smiles, and rarely participates in classroom activities or discussions.  His lack of enthusiasm is so extreme, and his older siblings have clearly already installed the notion of 'sucess in school' being too 'white'.  I noticed in class activities that he payed particular attention to the tasks requiring coloring, and had notebooks filled with doodles.  I mentioned the doodles to him once during class, and he apologized and swore he was paying attention.  I assured him that I was just interested in seeing his drawings and that I was in school to be an art teacher and that his drawings were really quite fantastic.  We got to talking, and I found out that he really enjoyed graffiti, and that his brothers and classmates told him that his drawings were girly. I made sure to let him know that the art world was actually very male dominated, and the next class brought in some graffiti books and images to show him real life application.  Since the connection, he's responded more to my help, and shown some real effort in the work we've been doing.

Teaching is all about knowing your students.  Finding what they like, and gearing lessons towards their interests.  My teacher had no idea that this student had any interest in drawing, or that his math homework assignments were magnificently colored in!  I think that it's really important to gear lessons toward real life experiences, and make 'boring lessons' less boring by making them applicable.  This student likes to color.  What if the language arts lesson was geared towards matching, and visually conveying the sentence to a group? Writing the sentence, and then drawing a corresponding image?

My teaching identity will be able to react to the distinct differences between my students because of their family,economic, social, ethnic, etc backgrounds.  My classroom was rich with ethnic students, multiple languages, and different backgrounds.  My experience has taught me that the students learn alot from one another, and that the diversity needs to be embraced and recognized by the educator in order to enrich the lives of the students.

I will be familiar with, and develop a number of ways to fairly assess and evaluate my students, knowing that there are a large group of diverse learners, and socio cultural differences that effect learning.  It's not fair to judge all students on the same progressive line of success because some are at a disadvantage as opposed to others.  In my classroom, the children repeat the same 'math checks' or 'language checks' at the beginning of each week.  Each week, the same students succeed, the same students fail, and the same students just scrape by.  I believe the definition of insanity is 'doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result".  In this light, the educator in my classroom is insane.  To repeat the same "here take this test, and when you fail, I'll just shake my head and ask you why you didn't practice over the weekend" is to tell students that they're stupid, and destined to fail.  For this reason, you have many students, like the boy I mentioned earlier who simply don't try because to try would be more devastating to them if they should fail.

I will be sure to be involved with the parents of my students, and work with them to better educate my students- something I think that my teacher does very well.  She is in constant contact with the parents of the 'problem' children, and makes herself readily available and easily accessible for everyone else.