Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy is centered with the students in my classroom. At the end of the day, their academic learning and personal growth is why we are all here at school. I make my classroom a safe environment for students to thrive in by encouraging students to take risks and learn from their mistakes as well as praising students for even a small amount of growth. Even if students aren't passionate about the subject they learn in my class, I ask that all students respect me as their teacher and respect one another as peers.

I recognize that not all students dream of becoming engineers or using the material they're learning in their everyday lives. One saying that I think applies very well to teaching is "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink." No matter how much a teacher tries to force a student to learn, the most they can do is present the material and hope that the student puts in their half of the work to learn it. In my teaching, this shines through with how I interact with the most resistant learners. I will never stop giving them the opportunity to succeed and trying my best to motivate them to do better, but putting in an excess of energy into getting one or two resistant learners to work will be detrimental to the students who actually care about their learning.

In my classroom, I treat every day like a fresh slate. Maybe myself or my students had a bad day yesterday, but I don't let that affect today's learning. Everyday is a new opportunity to do better and learn more than yesterday. Of course bad days happen but it becomes a problem when a bad day carries over and becomes a bad week or a bad month. This is why I treat all of my students with respect and understand that I don't know what is going on in their personal lives and they may not want to tell me.

One large part of how students interact in my classroom is through group work. I believe that students learn much more by helping one another out and stay engaged for longer than if they were doing work on their own. I might not be able to answer 25 students' questions individually, but maybe one of their group mates knows how to do the work and can set them on the right path. In doing so, the group mate will also learn the material better through teaching others.

In summary, my job as a teacher is to guide students in the right direction. I seek to help them become the best versions of themselves that they can be and to shoot for the stars, not being content with mediocrity.

Positionality Statement

Entering the teaching world straight out of college, I’m in a unique position between the age of my students and most of the veteran teachers around me. I can relate to the students as someone that was recently in highschool and I feel that it gives me a more modern perspective of the life of a student.

While I am similar to my students in some ways, I am different from them in others. I came from a middle class neighborhood in a nuclear family. On the other hand, many of the students I have are missing family members or need to work jobs to help pay for food.

As my goal is to become a math teacher, I have always been a math-minded person. I excelled at math classes from a young age, but struggled more in language arts classes. I recognize that my students may come into my classroom hating math or with very little prior experience. It is my aim to approach students at their level and reward growth especially if a student is still struggling.

Another aspect that impacts my teaching is the way I do work. I have always preferred to get hands on with the material over reading a textbook. My students will have a variety of different mediums to learn through whether it’s worksheets, around the room group activities, assessments, or online math software.

As I continue on this journey, I'm committed to leveraging my unique positionality to create an inclusive and supportive learning environment where every student can thrive and succeed.