Reflection Of Education And Teaching

This class has made me look at education and teaching in a different way. I never realized how much effort and energy teachers have to put in. There are so many more issues a teacher has to face then students notice. Teaching is so much more than showing up to class with a quick thrown together lesson plan. You don’t only have to teach these kids certain information, you need to teach it really good for each and every student to understand. When not every student understands the same that makes it more difficult.
I think a big issue that I would feel a big responsibility for trying to help is the achievement gap between the lower and middle/upper class. As Rothestein talked about in his article, there are many things we can do to try and help …show more content…
In the Funds of Knowledge for Teaching paper it states that typically teacher student relationships are thin and single stranded (Moll, Amanti, Neff, Gonzalez, page 134). I think this is so true. There were so many teachers throughout my k-12 years that I did not have a good close relationship with and I tended to not do as well in those classes. However, on the flip side there were many teachers who I could tell really cared me and I felt much more comfortable with them and tended to succeed in their classes. Another thing that I think will be my responsibility as a teacher is to be able to answer my kids when they say “when are we ever going to use this in life.” In many cases I believe that the answer will come easy however, in some scenarios it may be a little harder. You always need to have a purpose of learning something, but some things you are just required to teach even if you don’t think it is particularly important that the students know it later on in life. One thing I read in the Mike Rose article that would help me when it is harder to answer that question is that we educate for a number of reasons, “to …show more content…
The first would be having a special needs student in the class. This is one thing I am going to need to learn much more about. It is my job to keep this student moving forward at a good pace and make sure they learn everything they possibly can, but how do you manage to keep them moving forward and also keep the rest of the class moving forward without holding either group back. One thing I learned about this situation is that you have to look at what the student with disabilities can do and don’t think so much about what they can’t do (Class discussion, November 5th). That really struck me when our guest speaker said that. So often it is easy to look at a special needs person and notice what they can’t do and feel bad for them, but really you need to think about how much potential that the student has and what they can do. The second thing that I know I would really struggle with right now is if a student came to me and told me they were gay. I am one hundred percent totally okay with people who are gay and have friends that are gay, but as a teacher, I do not know how you are supposed to react if a student tells you this or turns to you for help because maybe they are getting bullied for being gay or don’t know how to tell their parents. I did a little research on how to help homosexual students feel welcomed and like they can express themselves. You can put a sign in