In Mr. McClung's fourth year reflection he realized two things needed to be changed. He came to understand that he was viewing his success by what his peers thought of him. However, he said that was not the scale he should be using, and he should be scaling his success by how much the students are enjoying his class. If the students look forward to going to his class and look forward to what he has to say than he is doing his job correctly and to the best of his abilities. I honestly think this is how we should view everything in our lives. We need to get our priorities in line and understand exactly who we are working for, the students. They should be the reason we get up and go to work.
The second thing he saw that was he was getting complacent with his teachings. He felt he was getting lazy and his lessons we sucking. He said we needed to challenge ourselves, in any way possible. He will be teaching a new subject at a higher grade this year. He feels as though this opportunity couldn't have come at a better time in his professional career. I think he is right in that we need to challenge ourselves. However, there will not always be a time that we can just move up a grade level or teach a new subject. If we feel we are getting lazy we need to find a way to get excited about teaching again.
In Mr. McClung's third year reflection, he has come up with five major objectives. These objectives include know who your boss is, don't expect others to be as excited about change as you are, don't be afraid to be an outsider, don't touch the keyboard, and don't get comfortable. One of the five that stuck out to me is don't be afraid to be an outsider. I love that. I think too many people focus on what others think of them and don't are not themselves. As a teacher, I want to be someone the students get excited about taking because I am not like every other teacher in the school. If I can get a few kids excited about taking math that normally are not, I think it would be great.
Another point that impacted me was to not expect other to be as excited about change as I was. Some people are very stuck in their ways and don't want anything to change. I think in order for younger generations to continue to improve academically we need to change things every so often to kept them interested and engaged in learning. I refuse to be someone that constantly shoots down other's ideas without even trying them. If I get excited about trying something different I will be excited in my classroom and hopefully that will transfer to into the way my students learn. Anything different will grab students attention, but our enthusiasm as teacher's being outside of the box will keep their attention so they are interested in what we have to say.
Barclay,
ReplyDeleteGood summaries.