Education Blog

I first want to say how much I am learning about being a teacher all within the first week of school. I am from Saskatchewan, where elementary school was from K-8 and high school was grades 9-12. There were no Middle Schools, or even provincial exams for that matter. I am finding out more and more every day what Middle Schools are like, and I am pretty excited and intrigued to go into a Middle School this week as an observer. I was reading “This We Believe” and I find the amount of focus on young adolescents quite interesting, for instance, how we teach them in accordance with the many different areas of development that they are going through. It’s a time of “tremendous variability amoung youngsters of the same gender and chronological age” (pg 3).With regards to last class discussion, throughout there was a big focus on “I”. Most beliefs, values, etc. are all about what “I” believe. I have, in fact, gone through four years of university thinking all about me for the most part. I wanted to get the best grades and learn for the sake of getting a career that would best help me in the future. Now that I am in the STEP Middle School program, I am still reading books, doing chapter summaries, and preparing for presentations for my own sake; however, I am doing so to become a better teacher so that my students will learn in the best way possible. As a teacher, I am still a life-longer learner, but the “I” becomes a lot more “them” or “us”. My focus is still going to remain on achieving my personal best, and doing my job to the best of my abilities, but it is also going to focus on my students becoming life-long learners and helping to them strive and achieve their personal bests. This past weekend I helped my boyfriend’s football team run the beer gardens at the Dragon Boat races. Three guys on his team are teachers, two in Middle Schools in Kelowna. They have both taught K-12 and both said that Middle School is the place they want to retire. They told me that the learning environment is very social, and as a teacher, you get to know the kids so well that they want to be there and try hard for their own sake, as well as for the teacher. It reminded me of what a lot of us said in our small group discussions about our favourite teachers with relation to the fact that our favourite teachers were the ones who were involved in our lives outside of class time. The ones who made the effort to get to know the students were most memorable. This is the kind of teacher I want to be, and I truly believe I will be!