Post 3

Throughout the past class periods and the readings that we have done I have been thinking about one question consistently, so I thought I would answer that in this post. My question to myself is simple, in my life who has been my favourite teacher and what made them the best?

This is quite a hard question to find an answer to, I have been lucky enough to have a wonderful education with many great teachers who were good for many different reasons. They have, almost entirely, all taken great interest in my learning, me as an individual and been interesting and excited to teach me. All had a keen interest in what they were teaching me and loved what they did. All would do anything to help ensure that I, and my classmates, would succeed to the best of our ability. All attempted to engage me and relate to me as best they could to make sure I reached my full potential. And all of the above things make great teachers, they are all qualities which create environments in which students can excel and be the best they can be.

My favourite teacher has all of these qualities and everyone in his class loved his lessons, even though some of them didn't like the subject, but he made the work easy. His name was Mr. Atkinson and he taught me Biology through my GCSE level, so ages 14 to 16. The Biology GCSE was one of the most dreaded exams, two two hour exams at the end of two years of school, they were the most stressful exams of the time. And yet, after a year and a half the whole class was ready to take the exams and felt confident that they would pass. All of us achieved A or A* grades in the end.

His lessons were so engaging that one hour felt like five minutes and a lifetime of discovery all at the same time. He would always bring in something to show us, something we could see, touch, dissect, anything to allow us to actively learn. I distinctly remember one time that we were doing gas exchange in humans and he had a sheep lungs brought in, and every one of us blew up the lungs.

We had to write notes and the only annoying part of that was that the way he taught was so interesting you just wanted to listen. That sounds cheesy, but it's true, everything he said just sounded so exciting and interesting because he was so interested and excited by it. When we finished the syllabus early he asked if we wanted to do a bit of the next level stuff, and we were all enthrall end to know, just to soak up every bit of knowledge he had for us. So he went through some genetic principles and we understood them better than many of the students actually taking that class did. Not because we were more clever than them, but because we all were so interested in what he was saying.

Many from my class were very shy students, me among them, we didn't like asking questions, didn't want to speak up or get in front of everyone. He noticed this and spoke to each of us individually instead to find out where our interests were, in relation to Biology or anything, then he made sure his lessons were centered on them. After a bit of time asking questions on a one to one basis we built up trust with him and suddenly found ourselves perfectly happy asking questions out loud. Within a few weeks we were all active participants in the classroom and were asking questions more than he was teaching. The best part of this was that he was happy to digress to answer the questions that really puzzled us. For example, although we were doing gas exchange he was happy to go into the nervous system when we asked what made us keep breathing.

I think this was the key thing as to why he was the best teacher, because he let us run the pace of the course with our questions and would be happy to switch between topics, rather than say, "we will get to that later" he just would talk about it now instead, equally if it was a totally different subject he would still happily talk about it. This taught us that everything was interconnected and that you can't just categories things because topics do overlap, and I notice that that is forgotten in many school systems.

Post 2

My friend Sam and I went to the mall to observe people and this is the chart we came up with:

Observation	Interpretation
Man in a coat	He’s cold and hasn’t removed it yet from being outside
Young man sat outside a shop on his phone	Stuck waiting for his girlfriend to finish shopping and bored
Teenage girl with parents and an ice cream	She got ice cream because she wants to be with her friends and its how her parents enticed her into going
Dad and two young children throwing coins into the fountain	Kids are excited but dad is cautious because he doesn’t want them to fall in
Mum and daughter look very similar shopping together	Mum wants to be daughter and daughter hates it
Three male friends walking around aimlessly	Hanging out with nowhere to go and nothing to do
Couple buying a suit in a taylor shop, woman does most of the talking	Its her choice and hes just their for sizing purposes
Woman carrying a young girls dress	Mum out to buy daughters dress for an occasion
Security officer walking around playing with his walkitalky	He’s bored and has been there for a while
Mum and Kids throwing coins in a fountain	Kids very excited, Mum is cautious but glad to have them entertained so she can sit down
Dad and son with a sports shop shopping bag	Went out to get sports clothing and cant wait to leave the mall

Our Parking Lot contained the following beliefs:

All men hate the Mall,

All girls are spending either their Dad's, Boyfriends or Husbands money,

Mums enjoy going shopping with their daughters more than they do.

I tended to notice the people's stances and what they were doing, whereas Sam noticed facial features and focused a lot on their emotions. However, our interpretations were fairly similar from different observations, which was interesting because it shows that everything can be interpreted in certain ways. We are both people who don't really like shopping, or the Mall, so a lot of our interpretations were saying that other people disliked being there too. I also think we focused a lot more on the individuals who looked like they were having less fun there. We were both more inclined to interpret things about individuals rather than explain what we see thoroughly, and that was surprising to both of us. We thought it would have been easier just to describe people and what they were doing, but instead that was the hardest part. Our parking lot contained stereotypes that we always thought about when we thought about shopping, and I think they are things that everyone else thinks too.

Post 1

My name is Jennifer Grant, but I prefer Jenny. I'm from Wales in the UK, from a farm in the middle of nowhere, but I love it, it's peaceful. I live there with my parents and my younger brother, who is pretty much my best friend. I have no idea what grades I would want to teach, all I really know is that I want to help people. I love working with young children, but I also enjoy high school ages. If I were to teach in high school I would probably teach Maths or Biology. I like cooking, I love baking cakes and things like that.

For me to feel comfortable enough to take intellectual and creative in the classroom I need to feel comfortable about the other people in the classroom, and know them well. I am a hard working and determined student, I always have been. I have good preparation for class, however, I'm not very good at speaking up in class. I work best when I write things down and use lists with colour. For example, when I revise I use index cards with colours and constantly refine my notes. The only problem with this is that it's very time consuming. When I don't understand things i talk to people in class and my teacher, but I'm shy so I tend to do that in one to one settings only.

When I was in school I had teachers who were very proactive, and would do everything and anything for us as pupils. However, my history teacher in middle school was not like this at all. He would sit at the front of class with a book and lecture from it, and we were expected to take notes from this without ever seeing any texts ourselves. After this long lesson our homework was to write a three or four page essay on the information we had about whatever we had done that day. It was the single most boring lesson I have ever been in and it killed any liking for history I have, now I will do anything not to do history. Which is sad because sometimes I wish I knew more, especially about more recent history.

A problem facing schools right now is how test orientated learning has become, it is very obvious to both teachers and students, that learning is done to pass the exam, not for sake of learning itself. What's more it seems that more and more tests are being added into the school system, thus exaggerating the problem. Teachers stop feeling like they can have fun teaching because the syllabus is so rigid and there is pressure put on them for their students to pass. The students themselves struggle because they feel like what they are learning has no real world impact. This is especially big in the UK where in my exams at the age of 16 I was taught one thing in Biology on a topic, then for my exams at 18 I was told that what I had learnt was wrong and had only learnt for the exams sake. If I hadn't continued Biology I would never have known, so I know many people now believe a lie taught by schools in Biology!

Dr. Shutkin, why did you choose teaching? And on the next level, why did you choose to teach college students teaching?