Week+3

 =Week 3 - So you want to be a teacher! = = = media type="youtube" key="irhvWP-KNrU" height="344" width="425"

Everyone has their own motivations for becoming a teacher. Personally, the attraction of being able to have an impact on shaping the future of a group of students is something that has driven me to this profession. We can all name 'that' teacher who we believe got the most out of us, however we can also name those who had little or no impact at all (maybe this person has helped us learn how NOT to teach). Whatever the motivation, we are all about to step into a profession which the majority of the global population has been exposed to in some time of their lives.

Today's lecture asked us to look at how we want to utilise the factors influencing how we will be teaching to our advantage. How are we going to present ourselves in the classroom? The Rogers & Freiberg (1994) reading proposes that teachers who put up a facade when they are in the classroom are less likely to be effective in their work. I believe that this is a valid point. If you are not being yourself with your students, not only do i believe that it would be tiring to keep the act up, the ability to connect with students will be much more difficult to achieve. Presenting yourself as a genuine person will make it much easier for your students to see you as a person and not a teacher.

I had a funny experience with a grade 2 class i have been helping with recently. When the class were working on story writing, the teacher (who is also my brother's girlfriend) wrote a story about how she would be going out for dinner for her birthday that Friday night with her family and my family. As soon as this was said, one of the girls in the class turned around and whispered to me in astonishment... "You have a family?!". It then occurred to me that teachers are not always perceived by younger students as being human like the rest of us!

The challenges of teaching are numerous, the work of Jaime Escalante showed the work of someone who had found a way to work with the 'unteachable' to achieve results that were never achieveable previously. The dedication and hard work of an effective teacher will inevitably get positive results from students. The question is how much time can we dedicate to our future profession whilst still maintaining a work/life balance?

Ayers' (2004) reading challenges us to dispel common teaching myths. The one myth listed in this reading that stood out to me was that //'teachers learn to teach in colleges of education'// I can personally disagree to this. We are all in the same boat at the moment, learning the theorietical background to our new profession through our classes and readings, however we can only learn so much without classroom experience to apply our new theories. We won't know for sure which elements will work for us until we are out in schools experiencing challenges and achievements first hand.