Trailblazing director Jean-Luc Godard knew that actors and actrices only do their best when they feel comfortable and catered-to. Students also need to feel at ease when learning. They also need to feel that the teacher is making strides to reach them in ways unique to them.
The soft summer Sun of a Clarksdale eve inspire the geniality I wish to evoke in my own classroom. Just as Its nurturing rays tickle the cheeks of all who are graced by Its transcendental presence, I too hope to be a sun for my students as I provide them with the energy and impetus to grow to fruition.
The Sun stretches forth her loving arms to all in the crowd. However, Her time with us is but ephemeral until She must part. Likewise, I too must radiantly shine upon all those who I have been graced to be amongst - students, parents, and community members of Clarksdale alike - during what propitious yet fleeting time I have in this milieu.
Simple modifications to the tools used in teaching can reap large results later on
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In order to ensure all my students have an opportunity to receive a quality education, I must ensure two primary criteria are met. First (and more importantly, in my opinion), I must ensure that all students are in a learning environment where they feel safe, secure, and wanted. After these requirements have been met, I must then ensure that I’m catering my instruction so as to reach those students deemed “hard-to-reach.”
To elaborate on the first point, as someone who’s been entrusted with the care and education of 135 individuals who mean the world to world to some person or group of people out there, I feel a sober responsibility to ensure my students have a safe and welcoming home in my geometry classroom. In order to realize this goal, I’ve enacted many classroom policies which foster a genial classroom environment in which individuals feel at ease to speak their mind freely so long as it relates somewhat to the class content and is appropriate. One of the ways I’ve done this is by enacting a zero tolerance policy towards laughing at other students. It’s hard enough to get reticent students to posit an answer in an already arduous course, but it’s near impossible to get them to do so when they fear the ridicule of their teenage, read judgmental, peers. With this in mind, I crack down stringently on any and all incidents of students laughing, sneering, hissing, or booing at other students. If I catch it, and at this stage of the game I almost always do, I send the perpetrator out into the hall and make them reflect for a while on the impertinence of their actions. I firmly inform them that I will never tolerate any such incidents again in the future and that any deviation from this agreed-upon expectation will warrant nothing less than a referral for bullying. At first, my students resented such stringency, but with time they all eventually assented and complied with my precepts (whether this is due to an actual deeper understanding of why I’m enacting the given rules or merely an avoidance mechanism of harsh repercussions is altogether another topic of debate more in the realm of social psychology and moral philosophy). Similarly, I’ve effected a policy which sends students immediately into the hallway for saying “shut up.” Not only are these two words not to be said in polite society, especially since they leave a poor reflection of the people uttering them in light of the fact that they are expected to be the next generation’s global leaders, but they overtly suggest that another person’s words are to be silenced. I stress to my students that this is my decision and my decision alone as to whether something is appropriate or not. If something needs to be rectified, there are other more civil means by which to do. Resorting to vulgarity for this reason is not in the least tolerated in my classroom as I want all of my students to feel welcome to share their ideas provided they remain at least somewhat à propos. Surely, coming across more resources would be a serendipitous occurrence, but in no way would it truly add anything to my classroom which wasn’t already there by dint of my stressing that respect will be the cornerstone of all interaction in my class. With more funds I would most likely buy students a class set of protractors and compasses, but in no way would this replace what I’ve already got. I’m willing to posit that any given geometry teacher in a poorly-managed yet well-funded classroom would trade a million times over all the protractors in the world to have what I’ve got, or should I say what we’ve achieved: a family. Not to discount the importance of teaching to each student’s particular learning style, but only after I’ve ensured the safety and well-being of my students do I take strides to guarantee that each student is understanding the material in his or her own unique way. As much as I’d like all my students learn in the same way and at the same pace, it’s simply not realistic for a teacher to expect to reach all his or her students when the lessons aren’t to some capacity catered to their diverse learning styles and/or backgrounds. When it comes to reaching hard-to-reach students, I’ve had to put into action both these educational approaches to ensure they’re getting the most out of my class. One strategy I’ve had to implement in my geometry class is the use of graphing tools when teaching coordinate geometry. For instance, while the majority of my class did adequately well on the problems when I told them to write the equation of a circle given its center and radius, for my more visual/pictorial students, such an abstract problem required them to be able to see the circle at hand. With this in mind, I made use of a laminated series of Cartesian planes that I had pinned up on my whiteboard so that they could graph the circle and thereby derive its resulting equation. Telling my strongly visual students that a circle had these and those properties was counterproductive and confusing to them for the simple reason that they couldn’t specifically imagine what that one particular circle looked like despite having looked at millions of other circles over the course of their lives. Once they began graphing them, though, things took a sudden change for the better and these students began to see how the graph they produced on the Cartesian plane resulted in a specific equation being able to be derived from it. However, this method was more catered to specific students and didn’t necessarily pull all students into the lesson, seeing as many students didn’t need to graph the circles on a Cartesian plane in order to derive a circle’s equation. When trying to broadly reach all students in my class, while at the same time specifically targeting those students who need all the aided assistance possible to be able to comprehend the subject matter, I had to make substantial use of culturally relevant topics in the Mississippi Delta. For instance, when I taught my lesson on the difference between perpendicular and parallel lines, I used the example of the intersection of interstates 61 and 49 – which they cross every day on their way to school – to exemplify perpendicular lines, and a picture of railroad tracks – which they also see on a daily basis due to the abundance of freight trains in the area – to illustrate parallel lines. I could tell I got through to many of my students in that they now could transition easily between the abstract examples I provided them on their worksheet and the concrete examples they are familiar with in their day-to-day lives. Trying to get all my students, including my hard-to-reach students, to grasp my lessons has been an ongoing process since day one. Admittedly, some days are much more successful than others. There are days when all the efforts I put into reaching hard-to-reach students backfires horribly – resulting in those kids being even more confused than if I had simply tried to teach them the traditional way. Similarly, there are many instances when I try to get my students to make the leap from the abstract to the real-world by relying on examples with which they’re familiar in Clarksdale, with the end result being that they still see no connection between the worksheet in front of them and what I tried to relate to what they’re used to encountering in the Mississippi Delta. However, despite the occasional setbacks, these methods have indeed yielded much fruit in terms of boosting student comprehension of the subject matter, and this to me is reason enough to endeavor to continue using such methods to reach my students. The occasional setbacks simply serve as a reminder to me that I may need to employ different instructional strategies, or make use of other culturally relevant situations, when trying to reach both particularly hard-to-reach students and all my students at large. At the end of the day, teaching is all about the students. With this in mind, I always try to focus my teaching on how to best ensure my students feel safe and respected – all within the context of having their educational needs fulfilled by learning the content in a way that best suits how they grasp material. |