Skip to main content

How I want to be viewed in my classroom

I've had a couple classes that were super boring. And having that thought in the back of my mind, I was not expecting a fun class when I walked into Accounting 1 in high school. The teacher had a reputation for choosing favorite and being extremely boring, but my dad wanted me to try out the class, so I didn't have a choice.

I walked in and chose a seat in the back of the class. But when the teacher walked in, we noticed that it wasn't Mr. VanDalen! It was Mr. Gould! His substitute for the semester! The first day of class he handed out the syllabus and told us he will most likely not follow the due dates and let us take our time with whatever we need because he knew everyone worked at their own pace. He also made us laugh, which was a welcome surprise in Accounting 1.

After that, I always looked forward to that class, even though I had absolutely no interest in it. Why? Because my teacher made it fun. He would assign us work for the class but no one complained because he made us laugh along the way. By the mid-term, half the people in the class had dropped out so he had the remaining students (five) circle up and do our work together instead of separately. This helped us get to know each other better and have a fun time in class. Sometimes he would even join the circle and help us. And along the way, we told each other stories about our lives and grew closer together. I really loved that class.

I know that most kids that walk into my future classroom will likely have no interest in Literature, but hopefully, they remember my class as fun. Hopefully, I'll be the Mr. Gould of Literature class! I already have some fun activities planned in my head like debate and circle discussions, so hopefully my students will find that enjoyable and learn something along the way. If anything, I want to at least be remembered as the fun teacher.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Sourdough Bread Journey

 I've always been interested in baking bread and I recently took on the endeavour of baking sourdough. Immediately, I started to hear how difficult sourdough bread is to bake due to the the time consuming aspect of baking the bread properly. Even before this journey, I knew that bread-bakers always attributed sourdough to a very difficult bread. So, I started this journey with my guard up, expecting to make many mistakes that would result in uneatable bread.  Guess what. They lied.  I'm not saying it was incredibly easy, there are plenty of lessons I've learned through my mistakes. But those mistakes do not mark a difficulty for me, they mark my accomplishments. I've made mistakes I never thought I could make through my journey of baking sourdough, but they taught me valuable lessons and I don't regret a single mistake I made.  I decided to dust off my blog after taking to a friend about sourdough, and all she had heard about it was that it was the most difficult th...

Students telling their stories

I think the greatest way teachers can help students is by letting them tell their story and paying attention to it. This can be by a short story assignment or just encouraging kids to write. Especially for kids who are bullied--we have a lot on our minds that often goes unsaid because we felt like no one would care. It's important to encourage students to write about their experiences so that they could try to learn from them. A great resource I found, though it seems a little rushed, is National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. This website encourages people, student or not, to write a "novel" in the month of November and submit it at the end of the month. What you do is you make a profile so that you can start your novel on November 1st. And every time you write, you copy and paste your progress into their website so they can keep track of your progress. You earn badges along the way and even get some feedback from other users. This is a great way to encourage kid...

The Joy of Baking

Having baking as a hobby was always a challenge for me, especially because I have a habit of getting angry and blaming the recipe rather than myself. It seems obvious now, of course, that I was to blame for all the burned food I prepared. But now that I am trying to be patient with myself and not rush the process, I am seeing better results. I finally understand how baking or cooking can be fun!  I used to be jealous of people who would eat good food at restaurants and be able to recreate the dish at home. My goal is to become one of those people. Because let's face it, we can't always go to a restaurant to eat good food. Plus, something about the sense of accomplishment makes the food taste better. There's something relaxing about taking your time and cooking something you love. Eventually, you start to think of ways you can improve the recipe and add your touch to it. Like, yeah cookies are cookies but mine have coconut flakes. Which makes them better.  The euphoric momen...