Student Teacher Relationship: In my senior year match class I had Algebra 3 with Mr. Derosby, he was a great guy and a good teacher but he had very little control of his classroom. He tried so hard to be our friends that no one gave him very much respect. I remember he would let me sit at his desk and play games on his computer while he was instructing the class. It was fun at the time but looking back I could have done so much better in his class if he had been a little more like a teacher and less of a friend.
Autonomy: In AP English my senior year I had an amazing teacher. For our project at the end of the year Mr. Brown had us all do individual reports on a set of novels all dealing with a particular topic of interest to us. This was great because it allowed each person in the class to read some great novels on a subject of their choice. I can still remember I chose to do war novels and got to read some amazing books such as Catch 22, Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front, and others.
Helping Students Succeed: When I made the transition for elementary school to middle school I suffered a serious drop in my grades, I was failing one class and getting D's in my others. I had one particular teacher, my language arts teacher, who recognized that I was bright but just having a difficult time transitioning so she worked with me and helped me. She didnt just look at my grades and my behavior and give up on me like some people might have, thanks to her I had all A's the next quarter.
Hands-On: When I took spanish in high school I thought it was going to be boring, just a bunch of repetiteted words over and over again and I wouldn't like it. My Spanish teacher was awesome though, he would bring in his guitar to a lot of classes and instead of just memorizing words over and over he would have us do activites and we would also sing songs in Spanish which also helped us memorioze the words and kept us entertained.
Connections: This may seem odd coming from a Social Sciences major but I hated Ap American history my junior year. The reason I hated it so much was because my teacher would stand in front of the class and drone on in the same monotonous voice for 80 minutes a day and not relate the material to us. It was as if he expected us to remember all of American history once the exam came around. He didnt even try and connect any of the political aspects of then to now or make us think about why our country is how it is today because of what happened back then.
