rough draft for compare/contrasting teachers

All through our childhood we have teachers that we remember for different purposes. The ones that we have sweet memories of are the teachers who impact us in a way of making us a person who pursues their dreams. The role of an educator is to inspire the students that they teach. My example for a great teacher is my eighth grade science teacher Mrs. Ebert and my example for my horrible teacher is my tenth grade math teacher Mr. Hobaugh.

The first way the teacher inspires us is them showing us that they love their job and that they care for their students. Mrs. Ebert was the teacher that seemed to be everyone’s favorite for this reason. You would walk into her class room and how much this teacher loved the subject she taught. There were fun colorful posters everywhere, weird items like sheep eyeballs and a coyote skull sitting on her desk, and a cabinet of animal bones and dried sea creatures on the left wall of her room. When she would stand up to teach she would be full of energy no matter how long the day had seemed. She tried to make sure that we all understood what she was teaching and not moving on until she knew we did. She used different and weird projects to have student’s present information to the class. One of the project was about the planets and a group did something that most students were not comfortable with… they did a remix of “You Belong to Me” by Taylor Swift that was all about Neptune. They came up with this idea after Mrs. Ebert had us listen to about the sun. The way that Mrs. Ebert got excited about this song inspired these students to go the musical route and was one of the best projects in the class.

Mr. Hobaugh on the other hand is the complete opposite. He is the teacher you look back on and you cringe a little bit and feel bad for any of the students he will have in the future. He is a short hobbit looking man with a permanent frown on his face. He is a teacher who rushes through his work and will not slow down when his student tell him that they don’t understand. He tells them that they were not paying attention and that they should try harder. Sometimes he doesn’t even know what he is teaching. One time he used Wikipedia to teach Pascal’s triangle and still didn’t make sure that we understood after he tried to understand it himself and then gave the class a quiz on it the next day.

Teachers are also an inspiration when they motivate you. Mr. Hobaugh was a lazy teacher who expected lazy students. His class had no structure and half way into the year some students started having side conversation because they had lost respect for Mr. Hobaugh because of his laziness and the lack of a helping success kind of attitude. He would never motivate us to be better students because he never wanted to motivate himself to be a better teacher. Mrs. Ebert’s classroom was fun and chatty but we as the students always knew when it was time to close our mouths and listen because we respected Mrs. Ebert and cared about what she was telling us. The reason for this is because she was motivated to help each student succeed and would go out of her way to help if they were falling behind without losing connection to the rest of the class. She strived to be a better teacher and to help her students do their best in school.

Another way that teachers inspire us is to tell us to chase our dreams no matter how big. Mrs. Ebert had the mindset that told us that we could do whatever we wanted to do if we put our minds to it no matter what obstacles stood in our way. she told us about what she dream of as a little girl and how she dreamed of being a scientist, when on field studies and worked in a lab before she decided to spread her knowledge with the middle school kids that she teaches today and would tell us that all of our dreams were important, would take the time to learn what our dreams were, and talk to us about how we could reach that dream.

 Mr. Hobaugh was very much the opposite. Any “inspiration” he tried to give us was a sports analogy that we all couldn’t relate to because we all were not in sports but all his talks seemed to finish with the same basic message that we were all nobodies and could not successful in life unless we got a degree in engineering or sports because everything else was unimportant. He shot down any other views of success and called us all burger flippers even though he never took the time to actually get to know us and learn what our dreams were.  In the movie stand and deliver, the teachers had similar opinions of their students. Mr. Escalante would tease them about the same concept but he would mean it in a joking manner, “you’re good now, but you’re going to end up barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen!” Mr. Hobaugh approach was interpreted very differently because it did not ever seem like he was joking. He would say his beliefs with such conviction that we all knew he meant every word he said and some of us resented him for it.

Mrs. Ebert is a prime example of an inspiring teacher who love what she teaches, loves to motivate her students, and tells them to follow their dreams. She is a teacher any student would be lucky to have and is well loved by her past students. She follows the concept of my thesis because she follows the ideal image if an inspiring teacher. As for Mr. Hobaugh… get out of the class while you still can.

Banking Concept and Standarized Testing

Freire’s views on standardized testing is that it is not efficient for students because in today’s society we use a system called banking education which basically means that teachers teach a one way path that follows the standardized test. Students think more than one way which means that a kid that is smart could fail the standardized test because they don’t think in the form that the standardized test is written or may not understand the way that the teacher teaches the subject. Freire says “the solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole: (a) the teacher teaches and the students are taught (b) the teacher knows everything and the student knows nothing (c) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about (d) the teacher and the students listen- meekly.” Freire would agree in a system where many methods are used and where students aren’t judged on how much they know through a standardized test. I agree with him because I do not believe that it is fair that special needs kids and students that do not know and understand English well are expected to do the same test even though they think a different way.

notes from "Dead Poets' Society" day 1 and 2

·         Neil’s Father is demanding and only wants it his way

·         Mr. Keating does not seem like other teachers because he does not have his students in the classroom and cracks a few jokes and is not boring and doesn’t seem like he’s all about perfection

·         Has students rip a page out of a text book because he says you can’t explain poetry in the way the guy in the introduction does

·         Has students interact with him

·         “we don’t write poetry because it’s cute, we write it because we are the human race”… say this when explaining why some who plans to go into business or medical needs to study poetry… what will your verse be

·         Other teachers don’t think students should be free thinkers

·         Dead poets society was a poetry club that administrations did not  approve of so it didn’t exist anymore

·         Group of students want to restart the dead poets society

·         One guy doesn’t want to read but is still invited to listen

·         The boys sneak out of boarding house and try to go to old cave down the road. They successfully make it out of the school and to the cave. The first meeting starts and goes pretty well but they don’t focus on poetry that all tell horror stories to freak each other out. Then tell poetry

·         Stands in different places to see world in different way (stands on desk)

·         Try to push students out of the box and make show they are useful and that there is a poet in all of them… tries to teach them life lessons with the poetry

·         Mr. Keating was warned to stop his unorthodoxed teaching methods

·         Neil killed himself because he felt like he was a disappointment to his dad and that he couldn’t do what he wanted to do in life

·         Friends and Mr. Keating are all in shock and grief… Todd wanted to think that Neil’s father murdered him just to think that he didn’t commit suicide

·         Neil’s death is breaking trust between friends and is ruining a lot of relationships because everyone is having a lot of grief

·         Mr. Keating gets fired because he “encouraged” the boys to start the dead poets society and went against Neil’s parents’ wishes and “lead him to commit suicide”… none of this was his fault

·         Students begin to rebel and stand up for Mr. Keating by standing on their desks and yelling “Oh Captain, My Captain” as he begins to leave the classroom because he was fired…. At the end he says “ thank you boys” and that’s where the film ends

differences between Garfeild and Welton

The schools are different because Garfield was a public school and Welton was a private school. Garfield was coeducation and Welton was an all-boys school. Welton was a boarding school and Garfield was not. Teachers at Garfield were not well educated in their subject and at Welton teachers were well educated and some of them were prior students at the school. Students at Garfield were more openly defiant while students at Welton were more reserved even though they wanted to be defiant. No bar was set at Garfield but at Welton perfection was expected. The pressures at Garfield were to give in to not caring or your nerd and the pressures of home life where the pressures at Garfield were to be perfect and live up to your parents’ expectation. Another difference was that they tried at Welton to make school their whole life and the students wanted to push away from school and try other things and at Garfield school was seen as a joke and students in the end wanted more education.

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.