Chapter 1: Becoming a Teacher

Joyful

• Lesson Plans

            I love the idea of lesson plans, creating a plan of how you’re going to attack a certain part of your specific teaching is exciting to me. How you are going to go about certain material such as the Cold War, and if you’re going to give them a quiz over their notes or possibly a group/individual project.

• Intrinsic rewards

 Reading about this in the book, I can not wait to feel this. Just imagine trying to get a student to understand why we have went to certain wars when they do not understand. Having to look at it from different angles for the student to understand is fun; I try to do that already looking at how to teach someone something more than one way.

• Mentoring

This is a great idea in my views, getting to know students and what they do throughout their academic life during the time they’re in the building with you. I feel it is very important to do it at the high school level with advisers to make sure people stay on top of things. I have been to a few high schools, 1 that did not have Advisory and 1 that did. I really enjoyed the advisory school because it felt like someone cared whether if I make it or not. While at the other school, it felt like I was a man on an island with no one out trying to rescue me.

Unpleasant

• Standards

Being in a school that had standards at the high school level, I felt there was no point in them. Yes it showed what I needed to work on but with a curriculum that makes you push on no matter what I really didn’t benefit from them being there especially because there was no one that would help me with my problems. It felt like Standards / N.C.L.B. was a dead end at the high school level, though I’ve seen it work with other schools at younger ages and it’s great. It basically cuts the problem right in the butt so they don’t have be scared of academics in high school.

• Work Pay

The pay for teachers is lousy compared to other professions. There are professions that you don’t need to seek higher education after high school that give you more a year than teaching. It is so unfortunate especially with all the time and effort teachers need to put in with grading making curriculum, lesson plans, home works, and quiz/test making.

• Assessments

I am scared of these; especially with schools now doing pay scaling on how well the teacher's students perform on these assessments. Not all students are great test takers which would be unfair to those teachers that have a large base of students that aren’t great test takers but are excellent project composers.