Sunday, March 24, 2013

Blog Post #9


















My Responds to Mr. Joe McClung's What I've Learned This Year (2008-09) 
  In Mr. McClung's blog post he shares all that he has learn in his first year as an elementary teacher. While some of the concepts are very simple, such as communicating with your students and being flexible with what happens in the classroom, the weight they have in a students' life is greater than what they seem. He starts out saying that many teachers do not make their lessons "student centered" and do not know "How to Read the Crowd" meaning that they think in terms of what needs to be taught but not if the students are getting it or not. Yes, having the skills to speak in public is a wonderful talent that everyone should work at but if hearing your voice is the only way you teach then the students will loose focus. Communicate is a two way street where you need to learn as much as you can about your students because as a teacher we may be the only person in a student's life who listens to them as if they are a person and not a waste of time. He also talks about being reasonable with our expectations of them because we set back everything in their lives when we raise the bar too high and scold them if it is not met. Remember: we are "dealing with children" and to expect perfection from them I believe is both heartless and cruel. He goes on to explain that technology has become a part of our lives and to give up trying to use it simple because you might find it difficult is not right. I have seen classrooms from complete opposite sides of the world be linked by technology and the children are better for it; we need to keep using what our students know to teach them or we might loose them instead. Finally, he simply states that we are to never stop learning. What is the point in asking your students to think differently than they did yesterday or find a new way to complete a task if we are not willing to do the same? I am very grateful for Mr. McClung for giving these lessons to others so that when we start to teach, maybe this time we do not make as many mistakes and keep sharing what we learned.


My Responds to Mr. Joe McClung's What I Learned This Year - Volume 4 (2011-12)
  In this blog post Mr. McClung is in his fourth year of teaching and I was very proud to see that within the first few sentences he states that he did not learn but two points over the past year. I was happy to see that he has changed over the years and pray that one day I too only have a handful of lessons I learned in one year because it means that I did more things right than wrong. The first point he talks about is not worrying about what your other fellow teachers think about your teaching methods. He states that as a teacher your main goal is the students and if they are having fun learning in your classroom. Will wondering if the math teacher likes your history quizzes make your students learn it better or will concentrating on only your students make them better? He explains that we need to focus on our students and not if the other teachers like us or not. The second point is that we need to challenge ourselves and not become so comfortable with where we are or what we are doing to the point that we begin to begin to not care anymore. He talks about how after he was teaching for a while he began to get into a routine where he would reuse old lesson plans and loose his creativity. He was saved when he was asked to teach another level of history and was forced to learn new material and rethink his lessons. This stopped him from being like his old teachers who did not made school enjoyable because he reached the point where he could do the same lessons over and over or begin to keep challenging himself on what he could do differently and he chose the latter. He decided that he would keep thinking of ways to help his students learn and I believe that it is this teachers, the ones who change their methods and lessons again and again over the years trying to find new ways to teach, that no the most good for their students by never settling for less.

2 comments:

  1. Learning Never Ends! Keep it up!

    Thoughtful, interesting.

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  2. Loved your use of rhetoric. This was a very good read, thanks! I have to agree that basing teaching methods on the students is an important concept to embrace. We are supposed to be the ones that look out for their best interests; academically at the very least. Have you managed to snoop through more things he has posted? It's all very good stuff.

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