Teachers Change Lives

     Many people in my life have asked the million-dollar question: Why do you want to become a teacher? Some people may have to stop and think about their answer, and some may answer this question in a variety of ways, but for me it is quite simple. I want to teach because teaching is a profession that has the greatest impact on youth of our society. Being a teacher means being somebody who is a mentor and role model to young adolescents. Interacting with students all day and everyday allows for great opportunity to inspire and to guide students to finding who they are and what they are passionate about.
      In my experience, my high school teachers were very influential, as they helped me to overcome challenges, showed me how to work harder than I ever have before, and guided me toward the realization that I wanted to become a teacher. My math teachers were my role models, and that motivated me to make good choices so I would never disappoint them. They were the people who truly believed in me, and encouraged me to follow my dreams of teaching math, even when other people around doubted me. They mentored me through some of my very first teaching experiences during high school. In my math courses they challenged me to apply concepts to real world problems and think in more depth on the material. Because of the math department at Lamoille Union High School, I have found my passion, and I am eternally grateful for their presence in my life.
       As a future educator I want to provide students with the same support that my high school's math department did for me. Links below are to some articles on the impact that teachers make. I find these articles inspiring and on my worst of days I will read them to remind me of my passion for teaching and the teachers who have been so influential in my life.

Teachers Change Lives
Why Teaching is the Most Important Profession
What Students Really Need to Hear

What will I make?

Today in class we watched Taylor Mali's "What Teachers Make," an inspiring video on how teachers have an impact on youth in our society. This video has me thinking about the impact that I, as a future teacher, will make on my future students.
Here's my list:
I will make students work hard.
I will foster a community within  the classroom environment in which students will feel comfortable expressing themselves.
I will make students explain mathematical concepts back to me so I know they understand.
I will encourage students take great pride in who they are.
I will emphasize the importance of problem solving skills.
I will show students that it is admirable to ask for help.
I will help students recognize how talented they are.
I will teach students how to apply mathematics to real world problems.
I will help students discover who they are.

Final Tutoring Experience

As the end of the semester approaches, our ELL tutoring placements are coming to an end as well. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to work with such a talented young student and it has been such a pleasure watching him grow this semester. My placement partner and I decided that for our final visit with W, we would take him outside to have fun with us and celebrate his academic achievements over the past few months. Given how much W enjoyed when we brought the HAPI drum about a month ago, we thought we would bring it again for him to explore his connection with music. In addition, I brought my ukulele and taught him how to play some chords on it. We also brought a frisbee, cupcakes that we made him, and a few other gifts we had for him. This was such a delightful time to reflect upon everything we have learned from W, and to enjoy our time together while celebrating his academic growth over the semester. 

My second major: Mathematics

A bit of a swap

Today when we showed up to tutor W, there was another ELL student sitting with him who expressed she needed our help. Her tutor hadn’t showed up that afternoon, and since there are two of us that tutor W, he suggested that he shares one of us with her. As future educators we must recognize that not all things go as planned, so it is important to be flexible. We quickly adjusted to the situation, and since W had history homework that my placement partner was genuinely excited about helping him with, I helped the other student. She was good friends with W, and it was really interesting getting to know her in the first five minutes of talking. She and I immediately realized that we have some of the same favorite singers. She and I worked on her essay in which she needed to use multiple online resources to argue her viewpoint on the Dream Act. Her assignment was to analyze each of the sources she used by identifying the perspective or viewpoint of the article and use it to determine if they are biased or not. She had a hard time understanding what biased means and what this concept of a viewpoint was. I then used our previous conversation about our favorite singers to identify that people have various opinions about every subject. Through this example which she found relevant to her, she was able to grasp this concept a little easier. I thought it was rather interesting working with a different ELL student for a day to see similarities and differences between them and my ELL student. I found that she was stronger with speaking in English then W, and that W is stronger with writing in English than she is.

The most fascinating part of our placement today was witnessing when she and W spoke in another language to each other. I assumed they were speaking in one of their first languages, but they were actually speaking in each of their second languages, which are very similar to one another but are different dialects. It was interesting to watch them have conversations in these languages and laugh about the differences in words when they went to teach us a word in various languages at the end of our session. Overall it was a great learning experience to not only watch such a fascinating interaction, but also to remind us to be flexible and adapt to various situations that may occur in the classroom.

Change is inevitable

Throughout the process of lesson planning, I’ve found that the biggest surprise to me was how much my lesson plan changed from draft to draft. I initially didn’t expect this to happen, I just assumed that each draft would be an enhanced copy of the previous one, adding more content as we expanded our knowledge through the course. This was the initial result of the first to the second draft, but then as my lesson partner and I approached the date of presenting our lesson and as we planned out the details of it, we noticed it vastly misaligned with our previous lesson plan drafts. As we created the NearPod slides to present to students, and fine tuned our in-class activities and assessments, we realized that the lesson we were constructing was far off from what our original idea was. As the date of our lesson approached, I began to re-write our lesson plan again and again to try to re-align them, but what I didn’t realize is that this change is inevitable. Each draft of our lesson plan was an improvement of the last, and even though our lesson didn’t match the first few drafts, it was a lesson that we felt was much more effective than what would have come from our original lesson plan.
One thing I really enjoyed about lesson planning was using a resource our class has created to help us in designing classwork and assessment. Throughout the semester our class has kept a Google Doc with teaching strategies we have come across. Each student has posted at least two or three each, which has added up to quite a wonderful assortment of strategies we could use in our lessons if we wish to do so. In addition, as we further our college career and dive into the depths of education, we can always refer back to this document for ideas of teaching strategies. This will be especially helpful when it comes time to student teach and create lesson plans for that. The link to this strategy log can be found here.

Lesson Plan Draft 1

Lesson Plan Draft 2

Lesson Plan Draft 3

Same subject + different students = different lesson

Today W was starting to learn about exponents, something I was thrilled to hear about! My favorite lesson I’ve taught was last May while subbing in a middle school, and I taught a class of 8th graders exponent rules. There was originally another teacher in the classroom and she told me to stay put and not worry about teaching the students, but then when the kids continued to ask why certain rules existed, she time after time said “that’s just the way it is.” After hearing that a few times I politely asked her if I could say a few words on the exponent rules. I then used the division rules of same base exponents to explain why anything raised to the power of zero is one. The students seemed very engaged and excited to hear somebody explain to them the “why” behind this. After that the teacher asked how I was able to come up with that proof on the spot, and after telling her I’m a double major in mathematics and secondary education, she asked if I was comfortable teaching the rest this lesson without her because she had other work she wanted to go do. The rest of the day I had the best experience working with these exponent rules in a middle level classroom, so I was overjoyed when I heard W was working on exponents.

I was excited to see how teaching W would differ from teaching the same lesson to 8th grade students. It was very interesting to show him new notation of how to express exponents and radicals. He really seemed to grasp that you multiply the base number by itself however many times based on what the exponent is. He had a tough time differentiating between something like 23 and the cubed root of 8 . These are both representing that 23 is 2*2*2, or 8, and that 2 is the cubed root of 8 or 81/3, but he wasn’t sure when a problem was asking for you to find the base, which would be a problem like cubed root of 8 asking you to evaluate that the cubed root of 8 is 2, or when you have 23 and need to find the product of 2*2*2. This was because this notation and language was all brand new to him. I took this hint and took a step back to discuss the language associated with exponents and radicals, and made him a key of which symbols correspond to which math language. This seemed to really help him grasp which process to use when.

It was intriguing to see the differences between teaching this to an ELL student compared to 8th grade students native to Vermont. The biggest factor that makes these two experiences differ so much was in the familiarity with mathematics language and notation. One thing that was helpful to W was when my placement partner made an analogy of exponent notation by drawing a picture. This is something that blew my mind because I hadn’t seen this analogy before, and the visual representation really helped our student to grasp the concept of the notation better. As seen in the picture below, the roots of the tree represents the base number, and the branches represent the exponent. This helped to show the notation and that the exponents is the number written higher than the base. The larger the exponent is, the longer the branch is, so we can think of this to show that exponents with the same base get increasing larger as the exponent increases. In addition, it is good to use the roots of the tree as the base because when you reverse this process you must take the root. For example, 8 is the base, 2 is the exponent, and it shows that 82 is 64. When you reverse this, you take 64 and use the exponent as the root, so that would be the square root 64 which gives you the base, 8. This visual helped to remind our student that in order to find the base you must take the root.