Good Luck and Farewell!

As we all head off in our many different directions, I would just say good luck and congratulations to you all. To go into teaching is a very respectable choice. We all have different emphasis areas but I believe this picture is true. 'a teachers words can shape a life' We are being given the great opportunity to help the next generations of students form who they are going to become in life. To me, that is a great privilege. All of these words in this picture are different values and all mean something to each of us in our own way. If we can change even a few of our students' lives for the better, then we will be accomplishing something amazing. In "Edwin and Phyllis", we were faced with reading about the different downsides of teaching. Some of us liked that reading others did not. I think that it was a reading that really made us have to think of what we were really looking for by going into teaching and how exactly we could defend our reasoning and values of teaching. There will be ups and downs in our careers as teachers. It is something that we will all have to face and wade our way though. Again, good luck to everyone in the rest of your degrees and in your careers.

My Approach, My Teaching

Throughout the class, I learned about so many different approaches to teaching. Many of the readings in this class talked about straight approaches by themselves. I felt that these approaches were a little to extreme to be useful. A full executive approach would not benefit my math students in any way whatsoever. There are parts of the executive approach that do apply to the way I want to approach teaching. I want to be able to implement good time management into my classroom. I want to be able to have some of the structure of the executive approach but not as severe. There are parts of the facilitator and liberationist approaches that can be mixed into the executive approach in order to make it useful for the classroom. I want to help my students further themselves and find who they are and how they learn best. My students should feel comfortable and safe in my classroom. Respect, honesty, and encouragement are all qualities that I want to be able to implement in my classroom. I don’t think that there is a name for every teacher approach out there. Every approach that is label has such strict set of values to it, but I don’t fit into just one specific approach.

            

Most math classrooms I’ve been in are taught with such an executive approach. I know that I will most likely need the same type of structure in my classroom too, but I wan to add some other aspects of it.  I want to add collaborative activities, which is not something that I’ve ever really encountered much in high school level math classes. I want to find my students interests and show them how math concepts can connect to their hobbies and interests in life. I want to show them how they can apply math to everyday activities and so many parts of their future lives.