What an effective teacher really is?
One of the most important articles I have ever read was selecting star teachers for children and youth in urban poverty by Martin Haberman. The part I think is most important in this article is when he says that States expect future teachers to go into urban setting to learn how to teach and that only that way they will become perfect teachers , and have the ability to teach anywhere at any time. This is such a bad assumption; it’s just like saying that all children are the same, or worse? Should we really blame students for the misleading interpretations of literacy? Which in this case literacy is defined by correct grammar or proper language; an article that I have found most useful in defining what effective teaching is James Paul Gees Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction and what is Literacy? Gee, literacy is, simply put as, "the mastery of or fluent control over a secondary discourse." This tells me that in order to understand this ideology, we must understand that Discourse is the "saying-doing-being-valuing-believing combination," or how people function within a society and relate to others (Gee 526). Which will imply on what good grammar/ language really is. He also says that, ”Discourses are ways of being in the world; they are forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities as well as gestures, glances, body positions, and clothes” (pg. 526). From everything I have read I can only say that effective teaching is not what surrounds us as educators, but what we do with the surroundings. If proper language/ grammar can only be learned through school why must students feel obligated to never really understand the importance of leaning the norms of literacy?
This brings me to another article which I believe really explains the misconnections of what happens when effective teaching is not implemented (by the teacher) into the understanding and the betterment of the student, just because a teacher refuses to take in mind the surroundings the school is based on. In Richard Rodriguez’s article The Achievement of Desire; he states that “although I was a very good student, I was also a very bad student. I was a “scholarship boy”. A certain kind of scholarship boy. Always successful, I was always unconfident (Rodriguez 432).” This alone shows me that he only did what he was trained to do, pushed himself forward with what he was told and expected to do, never once making the coherency of what he was actually doing. Therefore when he arrived at a more scholastic level of learning, college, it was then when he only understood what he was always meant to do, which was to learn something the way he comprehends the certain subject.
To sum it all up through my field work experience I have noticed good effective teaching. My teacher is so connected with her students that she never loses control of them, and she is never afraid to help them overcome their struggle. Ms. Marguerite Temple is the special education teacher at Bruce Elementary School (north side of Milwaukee) and she has become my all time favorite person when it comes to waking up in the morning and seeing her, she always has a can do attitude and that fresh start of the day smile. Every time I am there I constantly find her deviating from her initial plans to accommodate for her students. The first day that I walked in I saw her teaching the alphabet. She quickly pulled me aside and told me that she wanted to have the kids go up one by one so that she can see who knew the alphabet, who was using their tool on their desk (the tool had their name, a ruler and the alphabet), whom would choose whom to go next and most importantly she was trying to see the attitudes of the two new students she received that day. Ironically I wasn’t the only new person in the classroom, so I quickly adapted to the atmosphere. I could lie to you and say that it was what I expected on my first day, but it wasn’t. I was so amazed to actually see and touch on all the topics of affective teaching we discussed in all of my Currins class’s almost immediately when I walked into that classroom. Ms. Marguerite Temple amplifies all the things I aspire to be, I couldn’t agree more to everything she has said to me and everything I’ve read. Being a good educator, means to be involved in your surroundings, constantly adapting to the things that come up every day in your classroom, and most importantly loving every minute that you’re in front of the class and you have ten little kids with the brightest smiles to learn.
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