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?
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