My Influence

One thing that I have really thought a lot about this week was the poems that we read last week. First of all, I find it fascinating how very diverse of a group of people we are and how each of us came from an entirely unique walk of life. The other thing that I have been thinking about was the nerves I had regarding this assignment. I am normally a person who does not often get anxious about reading aloud or even sharing personal details about myself, but for some reason, with this assignment, I got very anxious and nervous when it came time to read it. What this has made me think about is what we, as teachers, will ask our students to do, and whether or not we would feel comfortable doing these things if we were in their positions. I think that it is important to keep in mind that students may have a fear of a certain assignment or task and this can negatively affect the way they approach an assignment or the effort they put into the assignment.

Another thing that I thought a lot about after class on Wednesday was how to best deal with kids when each are so unique in their needs. As this quarter has progressed I have begun to realize that I do not need all of the answers immediately and that not all tricks and tactics will even work with each student or each situation. One of the key ideas that was brought up last week was that there is no one correct way to deal with all of the classroom issues that are sure to arise, but rather it is important to create a set of tools to choose from depending on the students and circumstances. I am confident that this collection will grow along with my experience and time in the classroom. I can remember one time when I was working in a classroom and I had two students who had a lot of trouble getting along. The teacher attempted to put them in a group together in order to teach them to work out their problems. This did not work out how the teacher had planned and the two students spent a bit of time working independently with me after they fought. In order to effectively deal with the situation I had to handle each kids uniquely. One kid needed more freedom to work off his anger where the other kid required much more focus and wanted to spend time working through his problem with me. This is just one example, of many, where I experienced having to use different tactics to handle a common problem between multiple students.

This idea of what a child needs and how important it is to teach according is really pointed out in the Hargreaves article. This article discusses another issue that I have been thinking a lot about since I have decided to become a teacher. Emotions and being emotionally involved in my students, in my opinion, is a huge aspect of school that is often times over looked. This article does a good job of covering the aspects of this topic. A great description that was used to explain good teachers was that “they are emotional, passionate beings who connect with their students and fill their work and their classes with pleasure, creativity, challenge, and joy” (P. 835). They go on to explain how the “cognitive scaffolding of concepts and teaching strategies are held together with emotional bonds” (P. 835). I have always felt like one of my strongest attributes as a teacher will be the ability to connect with people emotionally but I have never found evidence of the true benefits until this article.

There is one part of this week’s reading that has me feeling a bit nervous. I realize that it is very important to have a good understanding of your students in order to be able to effectively educate them, but I have begun to notice that this will be a lot harder than I had originally thought, especially after reading the Hargreaves article. The idea of spurious emotionality is mentioned and this has me thinking. Hargreaves explains this type of emotion as something that happens when a person mistakes their feelings for the feelings of someone else. I can definitely see how being a teacher who assumes or interprets their students feelings for simply the feelings they are having can create a false relationship. A teacher must remain open to the student’s interpretations of their own feelings and opinions in order to have a true understand and emotional connection. My main problem with this, like so many other natural human habits, is that spurious emotionality seems like a characteristic that all people have and exists and may be very hard to recognize, let alone deal with in my classroom.

The last thing that I was thinking about this week that was explored in the reading was the idea of my position and my power. The Raywid article starts off by using an explanation of how teachers often feel subordinate to higher positions in the school system, which is exactly how I have been feeling up to this point. She explains how teacher often “see themselves as relatively powerless- in relation to the negative external forces against them” (P. 78). I was very enlightened to read on and find that in fact teachers do have a lot of power in the classroom and at their place of work. I guess I have always know, just never realized, but teachers do have a lot of impact on how their classroom is run, organized, how the class atmosphere is, what and how the students learn, and much more.

Overall, this week along with the readings and the class discussions have made me realize that I will be a huge influence to my students and that emotional connections are essential in all aspects of teaching. I have also had a chance to reflect on how much influence I have had on students in classrooms just as a visitor. I cannot hardly wait to get my classroom and start experiencing all of these relationships.