Teacher appreciation, will it continue?

Teachers are, in my opinion, selfless heroes. They are often unappreciated and underfunded. Ask any teacher and they will tell you that they are not in the classroom because of the money, the appreciation, or the respect, but because they genuinely care about the learning and well being of every single student in their classroom. They care about each student that comes through their classroom. Teachers also do not just care about a child for a year, but for a lifetime. These teachers will go above and beyond for their children, and that is exactly how they see their students. Each student is an extension of their family. Every year when a teacher gets a new class, they get a new set of children that they will laugh with, cry with, worry about, and, most importantly, love as their own child. They spend eight hours every day talking to, teaching, and engaging with these kids. Yet, they are underappreciated.

When a student is hurting, so is his teacher. They want to help fix their problems. They want every child to succeed. Some people think that teachers became teachers because it is the easy route, that they wanted weekends, nights, and summers off. In reality that is not true. A teacher’s work is never done. Once they are done taking care of their school families, they go home and take care of their own families. Their work is truly never done.

When this pandemic started, you could see a flood of social media posts praising teachers. They spend all day teaching children, and as parents started realizing just how much work teachers were really doing during the day, parents decided to show that appreciation. But let me ask you a few questions: Why did it take a national emergency for people to appreciate these heroes, and how long after this is over will we still praise these teachers?

During these unprecedented times I have gotten to watch firsthand just how much these teachers truly care about their students, and I do mean every single student. I have watched the sadness as they realize that some students no longer get the escape of school and as they realize that their students are going to fall behind. They worry about what the student will eat and what kind of structure they have at home. I have watched as they worry about the students they have not heard from. But also, I have watched as they start to plan how to fix this. They are already making plans deciding how they will catch their students up when they finally get to see them again. All the while they are teaching themselves how to use new technology and doing everything they can to keep in contact with those students who are willing. They are pushing their students to be their best even when their students do not want to be pushed. When this is all over, these teachers are ready to go back to being the underappreciated, underfunded people they were before because they are doing it for their students.  

Someday these students will look back and appreciate the teacher that helped them through, that pushed them to be their best, to do their best. Students will appreciate the teachers that believed in them in even when they could not believe in themselves. But why should teaches have to wait years before they have someone appreciate them? I think it is time we let these teachers know that their work does not go unnoticed, and when this is all over, let’s not let our teachers go back to being unappreciated.

Is School the Most Important Thing During a Pandemic?

This title may seem daunting. We are teachers. Of course, school is important! But is it the most important thing? During this once in a lifetime (hopefully) pandemic, I have realized that school is not the most important thing. With all that is happening around us, it is difficult to focus on school when it seems so miniscule to everything else going on. While death and sickness rates continuing to rise, it seems odd to pursue grades the way we were before. Some teachers have backed off and realized that there are bigger things in our life going on, but some teachers have not. While online remote learning appears to be the only option, that does not make it an easy option.
Students went from doing schoolwork in places such as the library or in quiet buildings. Now, they have to do schoolwork in their homes, where it may not be that quiet and they may not have a table to set up on. For some students, the only safe place they could go was school. Not only was this taken away from them, but they still have to do their work at home. This makes focusing on school a lot harder than it ever was before. I have heard stories of students being given more homework than they are able to handle. While some students may have less on their plate since they do not have to be in the school building, this may not be true for all. As teachers, we worry about our students not learning enough, but we need to consider that it might just be too much. Teachers cannot keep pretending that assigning the same amount of work will work for the students. This may be a delicate balance, but I believe that the balance needs to be achieved, because school cannot be the same as before.

It Takes a Special Person to Be a Teacher

          Have you ever wondered who the most selfless people are on this planet? Have you ever thought who else is going to help your children become successful adults someday? Have you ever contemplated which occupation is the most thankless, but the employees don’t seem to mind? Well, I’ll tell you right now, the answer to all three of those questions is teachers. Here’s another question: why do people want to become teachers?

            As a current student at South Dakota State, I have looked back on my days in high school, but not to reminisce about what I did. I look back and focus on what my teachers each brought to the table. No teacher is alike, and I think that’s a very good thing. You need a variety of different personalities to have a successful school, in my opinion. But they all have the same objective in the long run: to give their students the tools necessary to be success after high school, and to see their students progress from start to finish.

            I have talked with many of my old high school teachers, and they are my biggest supporters about my wanting to become a teacher, along with my high school teacher parents. I’ve asked them if they’ve ever gotten sick of teaching, if they ever wonder if what they’re doing is effective, and if they enjoy their job. Not one teacher has told me they’ve ever gotten sick of it, and they 100% enjoy their job. Some have said they have contemplated their methods when they were first starting out, but most teachers at my school have been teaching at least 10 years, and they’re confident in their methods.

            I also asked some of my old teachers why they went into education. I got different variations of the same answer. And that answer was, “I wanted to make a difference.” All teachers, I believe, want to educate their students to let them to be successful. And teachers are willing to accept a low-salary compared to many other 4-year degrees because they care so much about the future of our world.

            I started off as an electrical engineering major when I first went to SDSU. The whole time I was there, I thought about getting my masters afterwards so I could become a lecturer at a university. Even when I was an engineering major, I still wanted to me a teacher. It’s because I have what many other teachers have: the passion for teaching. Nobody wants an unpassionate person to be teaching them. If the teacher isn’t passionate about what they’re teaching, how can you expect the students to be passionate about it?

            It truly takes a special person to be a teacher. In my case, I want to be a math teacher. I am taking almost all the same classes of a math major, which could get me a job as an actuary, a statistician, or a banker. Those jobs pay way more than a teacher. However, to me, those jobs don’t seem as important. Are they all important? Yes. But who do you think taught all the statisticians, actuaries, and bankers the information they need? Teachers. And they did it not for their own personal gain, but to help their students reach their goals.

            I hope this blog helps you all look at teachers with a little more respect, because they deserve it.

Schools' Technological Progression

I sometimes forgot how young I actually am, and there are moments in my life where my age shows through. The other day it dawned on me that I am part of an exclusive group--a group is one that doesn’t remember the days before cellphones. I do not know when exactly cellphones were invented or became more attainable, but I do know that as long as I’ve been alive, they have been around. I also realized my lack of age talking to my mother. She starting talking about what I’m going to call a party landline. Essentially, your neighbors could hear your conversations if they picked up the phone while you were chatting with somebody else. I can’t imagine that: a life with no cellphones, not to mention life with a landline that’s not even exclusively your own. Not to mention, emails have also been around my entire life, but that’s pretty new as well. Back in the old days, where there were cars with carburetors, you had to send mail through the post office. I honestly do not even know how to send a letter, and I do not feel bad about it. I will practically never need to send a letter, and that is the future of most kids across the United States.

Technology has been moving at warp speed for a while now, and it is not intending on slowing down anytime soon. Communication is at an all-time high, and that is pretty awesome for the most part. What is interesting, though, is the lack of progress schools are taking to advance forward in a world that is racing past it. Before I get too far into this, I do not think an excess of technology is appropriate in a classroom, but there is a time and a place. I am avidly against a lot of technology in classrooms with exceptions to a few outliers. Classrooms are stuck in the 80’s with a whiteboard and a lesson that takes way too long, especially when students are having instant gratification on smartphones faster than ever before. Lecturing for a whole class period does not work, it bores the students. We all remember that one class we hated due to a teacher who did this, and for whatever reason nine out of ten times it always seemed to be some STEM class. Not always, this is more my opinion than an absolute set in stone fact, but it seemed that way.

It is important to make good use of technology in the classroom, as it can greatly enhance learning. In order to introduce a topic, there is a big array of things that the teacher can do, and technology often times helps. There are websites like Desmos that allow for teachers to make presentations that engage students and make them actually think. It allows for a students to actually be interested in math instead of just being lectured. With that being said, when it does come time for students to really learn the topic and not just be introduced to it, lectures do help a fair bit.

All in all, technology can be used as a tool to keep kids interested and engaged in the classroom. To me, engagement is the difference between a good teacher and a great teacher.

Crises Foster Innovation

There has been a lot going on in the past couple weeks.

Colleges and universities all over the U.S., as well as worldwide, have been closed. Public schools in 30 states, with the count continuously rising, have closed their doors. This leaves more than 50 million kids from elementary to high school at home without structure and sometimes supervision during the day.

This can be so overwhelming to think about and I completely sympathize with peoples’ fears, but the way that teachers have responded and reacted gives me so much hope.

Crises foster innovation.

For teachers of a traditional learning classroom, online applications may have never been used. Teachers in schools without one-to-one access have rarely had to help students with using laptops or tablets.

This can be seen as a hardship, or as an opportunity.

Now is the time to develop the amazing technology that we have into our daily classrooms.

Now is the time to learn the right and wrong ways to use online classrooms, video chats, and other online connections. 

Now is the time to work on flexibility with students who may have other obligations during this time.

Now is the time to create deeper connections with your students as we all go through this together.

This time will not only test our knowledge, but our character. How we adapt to these circumstances will affect students’ perception of schooling and can affect our own perceptions of our classrooms in the future.

Let us take this time as a chance to delve deeper into our teaching methods. Why only use lecture and homework methods? What are the benefits to using technology and different ways of communication in your classroom?

This will not last forever, but what we make of this time can!

Letter Chasing Vs Learning

This topic is one that hits close to home for me, and it is one that I do not look forward to dealing with when I am a teacher. Before I go on I must admit that I am very guilty of being a letter chaser. A letter chaser is someone who goes to school with the mindset of putting more emphasis on getting an A rather than learning the material. After my four years of high school and now into my second year of college I have learned the power of learning instead of chasing the letter.

From the very beginning of high school I was always told that A’s were the goal, and doing the extra work would pay off in the long run. Well this might be true, and I am not so naive to think that grades don’t play a factor in getting into colleges and other life impacting areas such as scholarships and awards. However, in this post I hope to give you a different mindset the next time you find yourself chasing the letter.

Like I mentioned above, I am a letter chaser. I am your stereotypical 4.0 GPA highschooler who did everything right. I thought that getting the 4.0 would make me feel great and accomplished, but if I were to give any high schooler advice today, I would tell them to not even look at their GPA. I know you think I am crazy! I spent hours a night studying, and I definitely missed my fair share of highschool sporting events because of this. It’s times like this where I wish I could go back and tell myself to go to that basketball or football game because highschool is a time where teenagers make memories and you sure can’t brag to you kids about how much time you spent studying! 

Another angle on this topic that has affected my life is the emphasis on learning. Everyone knows that once you take a test that you can just forget all that information and start storing the new material for the next test right? WRONG! Why do we even go to school? Is it to get the A in the class or is it to learn the material. An example of this in my life is in high school my math teacher let us use notes, calculators, and a unit circle on all the tests. Well if you are dedicated enough to take the time to take good notes, you don’t need to learn the material for the tests. When you end up going to a college where they outlaw calculators and expect you to know your unit circle, the game gets a whole lot harder. (Moral of the story: Know the Unit Circle!)

My third and final point in arguing against chasing the letter is just being prepared for real life. Yes, I agree that getting a good GPA might get you a job interview over someone else. However, the interviewer can already see and expect that anyone with the degree to know the material that is associated with that degree. So in an interview when all I can share are my stories on how I studied really hard, I can see how I would not be the best candidate for the job. I even see it here in college where I know super smart people who will land every interview they apply for but they may not land the job. My advice, don’t spend all your time for the interview, spend more time for the job.

To finish off this long winded rant; yes, I agree with you that getting good grades is important! They can get you into college and maybe get you some scholarships. I just hope the next time you are sitting at the end of the semester begging to get your grade rounded up that you remember the reason why we are all in school. And that reason is to LEARN!
Finally, as a future teacher, I hope my students can take pride in the failures and the stumbles that come along with school. To end in a cheesy quote, “You learn more from failure than you ever do from success.” Happy Learning!

The Time for Change has Come

Once upon a time, there were no public schools. Once upon a time, it was not the job of the government to teach our young people. Once upon a time, it was the parents’ job to teach and train their children not only life skills (which many public schools insist on teaching) but career skills. The blacksmith would give his child on the job training in the art of blacksmithing. The baker the same to his child. The merchant the same to his.

But then man invented the factory.

Before the human race decided to sophisticate itself, there were only experts. Professional degree training began at age six and ended whenever they decided it was over. Now, I by no means disapprove of the good fruit the industrial revolution granted humanity, but some of the bad fruit is still laying around. Our current public schools system is designed to produce a factory worker, but society no longer is in need of factory workers. Many of the people who manage to escape the factory mindset of school are hard at work designing robotics to replace the need for others to work in a factory. While some may see this as a curse, I see it as a blessing. People have amazing creative potential, but factories do not appreciate this. Factories give people easy to follow instructions then scrupulously watch over them to ensure proper execution… much like the school system.

This is clearly not an easy problem to fix, however the solution is beginning to present itself. New technologies have caused the advent of classroom gamification, mass customized learning and countless other previously impossible learning models, all of which gives more power to the student to learn at a comfortable pace and in the best way for them. These technologies are more equipped to enable student success in the information age, where mastery and creativity are key and Google has removed the need to memorize formulas.