My WPI Education

In my time at WPI, I feel as though even though I am studying mechanical engineering, it has greatly laid the foundation for me as an educator. I have touched on this a bit before in the beginning of my paper, but in my time at WPI I have been surrounded by group projects. In these group projects, they are structured for the students to make connections themselves within the curriculum in order for them to be able to remember the content. If you just throw content at students and don't tell them where it comes from or allow them to connect to what they have learned in the past, they will be even more confused, and the content will not stick as well. At Shrewsbury High School, that is exactly how we teach. The majority of the class time is structured around the students making their own connections to past content which I have been doing for the past 2 years so I was ready.

Specifically, to my placement, I was allowed to teach honors pre-calc. Honors pre-calculus is one of the most difficult classes to teach, not only because of the way it is taught, but also the content is just difficult. You need to be a very strong math student to just understand it, but an even stronger student to be able to teach it. The only reason, the head of the math department allowed me to teach this course was because of my WPI background. I have always been strong in math and that had shown in my WPI background. As well the rigor and fast pace of the WPI 7 week terms allowed me to be better prepared for the honors pre-calculus class which moves extraordinarily fast.

As well coming from a WPI background where I am studying such a math heavy major, and math heavy engineering major, I brought another level of relevance to the classroom. When students would ask “why do we need to learn this, even though it was rarely asked, I brought another level of significance when explaining why you have to study math because of my major that some of the other teachers do not have.

Not so much my WPI classes, but from before WPI I took Spanish from 4th grade to my senior year of high school and at WPI the majority of my friends are fluent in Spanish. Without going to WPI I would not have kept up my understanding of Spanish. Being able to understand Spanish helped me more than you would think at Shrewsbury High School. I was lucky enough to be a part of an IEP meeting while I was teaching and the students’ parents only spoke Spanish so we had a translator. However, when they spoke to me, I was able to pick up on what they were saying and not having to go through the translator to get their point across, brought another level of comfort and trust about me. As well I have many students who speak Spanish as their first language and I was able to catch what they were talking about in class. One day they had said some choice words in Spanish and I was calmly able to shut it down, even though I could not respond in Spanish, I got my point across and there were never side Spanish conversations again.

While I was in the WPI teacher prep program, I had to participate in many different classes, including “Development Psychology”, “Sheltered English Immersion”, “The Psychology of Education and “Teaching Methods”.

My two psychology classes that I took, allowed to me understand in a deeper level of how students take in and process information. This is imperative when teaching. If you do not know how your students learn how are you supposed to teach them? I was enlightened on all of the different learning styles that there were and I learned how to teach top every one of them. These classes taught me the sometimes the best thing for a student is to not be in class and just take a break. This is why I would always allow my students to take a walk if they needed it. I very rarely would say no to a bathroom break or a water break. One because it is a basic human right to use the bathroom but I also knew some of them just had to step out. This policy the kids picked up on and respected me for even more by the end of my time at Shrewsbury because they saw I treated them with respect.

The Sheltered English (SEI) Immersion class allowed me to explore how to educate ELL students in the classroom. I had never had any background on that before and I left the class with my SEI certification.

Teaching methods was taught by a principal at a nearby school. This class dove deeper into the methodology behind education. Why we do what we do in the classroom. This class also dove deeper into how to write exemplary lesson plans that will reach more than one type of learning style per lesson. It taught me about the first CAP element before I even started my practicum.