Fundamentals of Teaching
As a teacher, children are my primary focus and responsibility. While I am a teacher of history, I am more importantly a teacher of children, no matter what class I am teaching. To lose sight of the needs of children is the surest way to fail as an educator. To succeed as a teacher, I must remain focused on the students at all times. Children are surely our greatest assets. Their ability to grow is astounding – a well-taught child can make leaps that would not have seemed possible at the beginning of the year.
While they are amazing, children can also be very difficult for a teacher who cannot keep them focused. Maintaining control of the classroom is vital – no learning can happen without control. While children can make the teacher’s life difficult, this should not frustrate the teacher. Education is, despite its difficulty, a vital task. Education prepares our children for potential success in a difficult world, a world in which education is vital. Ideally, education should also help to reduce the class inequality that is so pervasive in our society. It is my hope that, education can provide students with an opportunity to get out of poverty, instead of maintaining the poor quality of life that many students experience.
As a teacher of history, it is also important for me to make history interesting and immediately relevant for my students. For too long, history has been taught as a boring mass of facts that students must memorize, repeat and then forget. Few students ever really remember, much less understand, the history that they learn in high school. Instead, they often hate history, and see it as a dead discipline and a waste of time. One of my goals as a history teacher is to change this perception and to make history an interesting and engaging subject that students will like. This will not be an easy task; however, I am dedicated to getting my students interested in history.
In order to make this happen, my primary resource will be a higher-level approach to history. My students will be exposed to the causal nature of history, and asked to consider the causes and effects of historical events. My students will be able to place historical events in context and, as a result, will understand why they happened.
In many low income communities, there are teachers that are careless and provide their students with poor quality education. These teachers are there just to make sure that they keep receiving their monthly paychecks and act in this way because they believe that low income students do not have the drive, the passion, or the potential to be able to make something of themselves and one day be in a better place than they are now. Anyon reveals that in working class schools student’s “Work is often evaluated not according to whether it is right or wrong but according to whether the children followed the right steps.” (3). This is important because it demonstrates that low income students are being taught in a very basic way. These children are being negatively affected by this because if they are always being taught in this way then they will never be challenged academically, which can play a huge role in their futures. This argument can also be seen in other articles. In the New York Times
History has many examples of these three themes, and to record them all, you would need to write a book. The three themes discussed in this paper have been used to inform and teach young students that history is important; Therefore, it is important to know your history; if you don't learn from history, then you are doomed to repeat
Many people try to think “back to the good old days,” when really they were not that good for most people who had no rights. With the advancement in technology, we were forced to open our eyes to what is going on in the world around us and the disadvantaged people face throughout the world. As a society once we start to working on damage control to clean up the mess we got into we can finally have true change. The damage control will take time and effort from all people involved on either end of the situation. One major move I feel we can make is by giving honest history lessons that cover every part of our history in schools. I feel that American History and World History should be more emphasized on in our school systems and curriculum. If the students get the full education of our history and how we got to where we are, then moving on will become easier. We expect for children to lead us into a bigger and better future, but how can we expect that without the truth coming to light for our diverse culture. We cannot expect to make this country better without knowing their full history and the mistakes we have made in our past. Looking for another way to move forward, Essence asked Dr. Joy DeGruy on what we could do moving forward, her answer was, “…more research, support, and assistance are needed to produce vital healing…that exceeds the injury
The Wright Brothers were credited and praised by people for finishing the glider and flying it successfully. Crowds of people would watch the Wright Brothers and would celebrate with them. The greatest of their accomplishments being preparation. They had both practiced a lot in their spare time and aimed for good grades with percentages around 95%. But even though they had gotten those good grades they decided not to apply for a diploma.
... my classroom I have created an environment where we are a family and as a whole school we are a village where interdependence is celebrated and we work together to do the best for our children and each other. In our village we all need to love and be loved. If I didn’t love my children I would not be catering for their needs. For successful learning to take place the children need to feel a sense of worth and meaning. Each child in my class is here for a reason and are valued as individuals whose lives are meaningful and so worthwhile (Groome, 1998, p. 93).
Zinn, H. (2007). Why Students Should Study History. In W. e. Au, Rethinking Our Classrooms, Volume 1 (pp. 179-181). Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools.
Teachers help us expand and open our mind by giving us skills throughout students’ early life to help students when they are older. By learning information from teachers, students become better people, in a couple of ways. Besides inquiring knowledge from their teachers, students learn to work with one another, open their mind to other peoples’ thoughts and ideas, respect one another, and learn different techniques for life’s issues.
There is an alarming rise in childhood obesity throughout the United States, making it an epidemic in our country. Obesity has become a threat to the health of many children. Childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past 30 years. The percentage of children aged 6–11 years in the United States who were obese increased from 7% in 1980 to nearly 18% in 2012. Similarly, the percentage of adolescents aged 12–19 years who were obese increased from 5% to nearly 21% over the same period.(Childhood Obesity Facts, 2015)
It is almost unanimously agreed that most students perceive History as the most boring subject in schools today and maybe since the beginning of time. In Lies My Teacher told Me, James Loewen explains why he thinks students hate history. Loewen believes that because teaching history is dominated by textbooks that if one were to change the way textbooks are written it history would be less boring. He exclaims that we can blame a huge part of the problem is context and accuracy of the past (or lack thereof) impairs the quality of American history. Loewen states,”Most authors of history textbooks don’t even try for melodrama. Instead, they write in a tone that if heard aloud might be described as ‘mumbling lecturer’.”( Loewen p.386-387) ) Would
Her family wanted her to get the best education possible. Even though she was a women, her father wanted to make sure she received plenty of knowledge. This was very important, especially at that time because women played a different role than what Austen went through. Sure, she would get dressed up, but she never was taught to play a subservient role that most women in that age played in society. She never was taught to look for a husband, in fact, her father wanted her to develop all her assets, from dancing, playing piano, and storywriting. Her family encouraged her and her siblings to be creative, which made Austen the great writer she was. She gained the ability to realize what is real and what is fake. She is able to portray it to the reader when Elizabeth and Darcy start falling in love with each other. Elizabeth and Darcy were actually never meant to be with each other through society's eyes, after all, Elizabeth was in a totally different class than Darcy. Darcy was actually supposed to marry someone in his social standing, yet manages to fall for Elizabeth out of love, who he deems is below him at first. Jane Austen depicts how true love shouldn't be shadowed over by something as shallow as to how much money someone owns. Austen even suggests that love can overpower even the most prideful and prejudiced people. She insinuates that love can even
Born on December 16, 1776 in Steventon, England, Jane Austen is easily one of the greatest writers in English history. While not especially popular in her own time, Austen’s novels reached impressive heights around the late 1800s and so forth into the 20th century where her works became regarded as literary classics.
Jane Austen was an exceptional English author of romantic fiction novels. However, it was not until after Jane’s lifetime that she was well acknowledged as a writer. Jane grew up with a large family whom she was very close to. She was inspired by her family greatly, and because of this wrote about situations relatable to everyday life. She was also a very innovative author; she helped to shape new ways of writing in her works. Through examining Jane’s relationships, dynamics of her writing, and novels themselves, we will be able to have a much broader understanding of Jane.
Teaching history in the public school system can present educators with a unique set of challenges that are not found in any other subjects or disciplines. Furthermore, the distinction between U.S. and World History course structure need to be identified in order to effectively incorporate textbooks, unit tests, state standards, and student prior knowledge into the class. U.S. and World History classes differ in many aspects; and the teacher needs to know how to separate the two distinct course structures.
Teaching is a daunting task that I do not intend to take lightly. Becoming a teacher has been a dream of mine for several years. I always knew that teaching would be the career for me, especially when I began working in the school system as a substitute secretary. I loved working in the school environment; coming in contact with children everyday made me realize how much I would enjoy teaching a classroom full of students.
When most people think about history they remember a boring class they took in school a long time ago, they recall memorizing important dates, taking map tests, and falling asleep while listening to a lecture. The truth is that history really is an important subject to be teaching students. History is more than just some lecture you receive in class, history lets us look back, see the good things and the bad things, it allows us to learn from our mistakes and prevent such mistakes from happening in the future. Things that happened in the past are still changing things that are happening today. History is needed for everyone, from government leaders down to individuals; everyone has learned one thing or another from history at some point in their life.