what I value in a teacher

A lot of teachers think that the only way they can teach is by standing in front of a class and lecture it seems and it makes the class not interesting and makes students not care because it gives off the impression that the teacher does not care about the students. This makes students not want to do homework and not try on class assignments which can effect their grade. What I value in a teacher is that they know how to connect and engage with the students. It makes it harder to learn if they are boring and seem like they have no interest in you as a student.it makes it easier if the teacher is not all business and know how to make the class fun but still have structure in the class and still play the role as a teacher. I feel students pay more attention and learn better that way because they don’t want to fall asleep in class because it not interesting or talk the whole time to their friend because the teacher doesn’t care and there is no structure. If students truly enjoy the class for these reasons they are more likely to succeed in the class and have better grades.

Audre Lorde: comparing and contrasting teachers

Audre Lorde story was very interesting. I thought that her talking about how catholic schools talked about public schools were very much how people who go to public schools see catholic schools. Mrs. Baker changed the way Audre acted and I think that is very important to a child who feels like her parents can’t connect to her. I think Audre felt like Mrs. Baker made that connection. Mrs. Baker praise Audre when she did well and got excited when she learned to do new things that Audre hadn’t been rewarded for in the past. To a 5 year old that is important. Miss Teacher, on the other hand, seemed like she didn’t want to understand Audre’s needs and was stubborn about her ways of teaching and was willing to embarrass Audre into doing something she couldn’t do. How the article helped me was it gave me an idea of how to organize my second paper.it showed me how to compare and contrast teachers in a different way: by telling a story. I found this article very useful and will try to use its format in my second paper.

thought on Ken Robbinson's speech

Education prepares us for an unknown future because we don’t know what jobs will be available in the future. Ken Robinson says that human creativity is squashed as we get older but people who teach us it is wrong to fail. If we are afraid to fail then our creativity starts to go away.  People teach kids that they should have a career in mathematics or English because they are what create good jobs. Ken talked about a little girl who was really fidgety in class and she couldn’t think without moving so her mom took her to a physiologist and the physiologist told her mom that she was a dancer and later in life she became a famous chorographer. Now they would have diagnosed her with ADHD and put her on a pill to calm her down. Ken says that students who say they aren’t good at school and aren’t smart actually are but we focus on other subjects when they maybe good at something more artistic. The arts programs in school are the lowest paid programs. Ken thinks that they should be just as important in the school system. I agree with him and found his speech very insightful.

"Stand and Deliver" obsevations

In the first part of the film I noticed that when the teacher first walked in the room students were doing and saying whatever they wanted to and didn't care about learning. The teachers started joking around with them and would break the ice with a fraction activity that included using cut up apples. When students started to notice that the teacher cared about their learning by talking to their parents and talking about them going to college the students started to care more. In a course of 2 years the student went from 7th grade math to learning calculus and trying to get college credit. One of the things I didn’t like about the teacher was that sometimes he went too far with his jokes and hurt his students when we would talk about their personal lives. I feel that those kinds of conversations belong outside of the math classroom. I did like that he tried to connect to each student and help them succeed as an individual no matter how much they didn’t believe in themselves. He tries to make each student feel like he or she can go to school and have a career no matter their background or the color of their skin. He is a teacher that puts his students over himself and is will to work extra hard to make sure his students get the best possible education.