This quotation has become more meaningful for me in the past year than any other time in my life. I am a passionate person to my core, and if I feel strongly enough about something, I will pursue it with everything I am. I am passionate about community service, teaching and learning; perhaps that is why my main activities from day to day involve studying, reading, teaching and helping others. One thing I wish I could have, but is an impossibility, is more time. I don't like when I have to choose between two activities I have a passion for. I have to ask myself, "Which is more important?" or "Which is more beneficial?" It always hard. This choice has come up many times lately and because of time, I have to leave the best job I have ever had (school's fault).
I have had the fantastic experience of working at Sylvan Learning Center for the past year. This job has helped me improve my teaching skills in a remarkable way. I got to teach so many different subjects (Math, Reading, Study Skills, Spanish, ACT/SAT prep, TAKS, and Writing) and got to work with every age-level, from 6-year-olds to college students. This experience helped reinforce that I definitely want to work with older students, mainly middle and high school. Don't get me wrong, the little ones are absolutely precious and always make me laugh, but frankly, they just wear me out! While I love teaching the students, helping them build their confidence and skills, my favorite times are just sitting and talking to them. At Sylvan, we have ten-minute breaks every fifty minutes (psychology shows that this improves retention). I always have several students that will use that break time to come talk to me about school or life, and I love it. One day, I walked into work and three students that I had never taught saw me and ran over yelling "Miss Tracey!" to give me hugs. :)
One day, I came to Sylvan and was informed that I would be teaching a new writing student, let's call him John Doe. Now, John had been coming to Sylvan for math help already, and I often watched him with his teachers and thanked God that I didn't have a student like him. Haha. He wasn't a bad student by any means, for the most part. He finished his work and was polite; however, he let me know very quickly that he was in charge and he was right. My silly grammar rules and writing techniques (that have worked for centuries) were not correct. How do you explain dangling modifiers to a student who refuses to take your word for it? "Well, dangling modifiers are modifiers that have no subject attached to them. For example, in the sentence 'Slamming on the breaks, the car lurched forward' there is a dangling modifier. Who slammed on the breaks? The car didn't. Therefore, we need to add a subject after the comma to get rid of the dangling modifier. So, a correct sentence might say 'Slamming on the breaks, Bob lurched the car forward. Does that make sense?" John then proceeded to tell me that that wasn't how he saw it. The sentence was correct. No dangling modifier, just like he said. I sighed. He was by far one of my most difficult students, not to mention, he was only three months younger than me, but I may have led him to believe that I had been teaching high school for several years. He never looked at my Aggie Ring to confirm the '09 graduation date. Now, while John was slightly difficult to work with (cough, cough, REALLY difficult to work with), I could not have been more proud when I found out that he had done well enough on his writing sample to get into the school he wanted. Yes!
I could tell stories galore about my experiences with these students, and I'm sure I will tell more. I know each of them has the ability to be successful. I have had some very difficult students, some disobiedient students and some perfect angels, but each one has a special place in my heart. I can't wait until I have my six class periods of bright and shining faces with eager minds for me to mold. Again, in that experience, I will have numerous personalities, achievement levels and behavior problems to deal with, but I don't foresee having a student that doesn't touch my heart.
I can't help but sit here and smile and laugh a little. I am picturing my classroom right now, and each student walking through my door on August XX, 2010. :)
-Tracey
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