Mrs. A. Non

Talking about past teachers is tricky for several reasons: a)I'm the not the person I was when I was a student b)They are not the person they were when they were my teacher c)The internet is public.

The first two are really the most important, the third problem just keeps me from naming names.

When I was in High School I was mostly indifferent about most of my teachers. However there was a teacher I really did not like and several teachers that I did like. When looking back however, I believe that I would not appreciate my least favorite teacher.

She tried to give us lots of freedom in our projects and assignments while also having high expectations. She made references to popular culture. She allowed for more artistic vision, and she tried to encourage the girls in the class.

She was in retrospect a lot like how I would like to teach. She lectured, but kept it interesting and more like a dialog, she allowed for great differentiation in assignments, she believed in personal and societal responsibility.

She was my least favorite teacher.

I did not want a class that encouraged me to invest into assignments, nor did I want someone trying to make me more introspective or, well, do anything hard. So though she was a very good teacher, I was a very lazy student. But here's the real trick. I wasn't "normal" lazy, or her differentiation would have accommodated to me. I was academic lazy. I wanted to follow clear guidelines that reigned me in and kept me from thinking to much. Or well, maybe that is normal lazy. Anyways, now in college clearly defined rubrics frustrate me to no end and I love to have classes with teachers that were like her, and that's hard to get my head around.

Maybe I should write her a letter, cause I'm sure I made her class more difficult.

For extra credit for the one person who reads this blog regularly and who went to High School with me: Guess which teacher I'm talking about. Hint: You loved her

The Wire

Despite a heavy academic workload these last few weeks of the semester, I have been finding, or rather, refinding, a good way to relax: The Wire (and How I Met Your Mother, but that's for another post).

For those of you unaware of this masterpiece show about the systems of the city of Baltimore, well watch it. I could extoll its many virtues for a very long time, but again, that's for another post.

This time around, I was brought in particularly by Season 4 which focuses with the school systems of Baltimore and the lives of middle schoolers. Though the focus of the school scenes are these students, ample time is also spent on the various teachers, especially one new teacher who will be unnamed due to spoilers. Anyways, while watching this season I noticed a lot of things about what is and is not effective in such a classroom/system.

A form of tracking happens at the school and is shown as being fought by the administration, but allowed by the parents. Now this tracking did not involve giving worse resources to worse students, it involved giving worse students different goals. This in many ways reminded me of my field placement in a special education classroom at Goshen High School, those kids were not given less attention or resources, but they also were working towards being able to live and find a job whereas most general education classrooms are working students towards higher education.

This sort of tracking seems very beneficial for both sets of students. The trick is such a system of tracking requires more faculty and staff and could only work if the parents and students agreed to being tracked towards vocation instead of towards college. Now of course this was in a television show, but I thought it would be a beneficial idea could it be implemented well.

Throughout the season the new teacher struggles. First he has to keep the students from being violent, he attempts a token economy, social contracts, and several other forms of behavior modification. In the end he more or less settles on changing the curriculum to foster rapport building between him and his students. After a time of this he transitions back into the normal curriculum. While I think this was a little extreme, it illustrated well how important rapport is and how creativity and flexibly is also key to teaching effectively.

The trick with rapport is that sometimes personal attachments can become too strong. Near the end of the season this new teacher struggles with several students being socially promoted to High School. He argues with the administration that the students are not ready yet, to which the administrator replies that the goal is to help as many students as possible and that the teacher needs to keep in mind that next year there will be a whole class of students who needs him as a teacher just as much.

Multiculturalism

This past week I participated in a mock interview for a teaching job. The first question that I was asked was why and when did I decide to become a teacher. Well, I became a teacher in order to do two things: interact with young adults and to contribute to my country. For me, teaching social studies to a way for me to fulfill my civic duty by helping create the next generation of effective citizens. In a democracy, especially one of so many cultures such as the United States, a multicultural education is key to helping form and encourage effective citizenship.

Multicultural education really has two main components: empowering students and teaching the skill of critical reflection. Empowering can be accomplished by any number of things. Students could be given vast artistic agency to perform a drama or some slam poetry. They could also be empowered through the simpler and less consuming poster project. The key is voice giving. This requires creative control and an audience.

Students can, thankfully, also be empowered by arguing, an activity that encourages critical reflection. Critical reflection can also be encouraged simply by critical lessons or by metareflection lessons when students can practice diagraming and somewhat deconstructing the aims and flaws of advertisements or political speeches.

The key really is to make multiculturalism a priority during instruction. Sure specific lessons and exercises will help greatly, but if a teacher is reflective, critical, and empowering students will pick up on that. And they will become better citizens for it.