Student Teaching Week 6: Putting Your Foot Down

https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/18724297/Drill-Sergeant

Six weeks in already? This experience has been flying! This week I have been thinking about how lenient I should be as an educator. Where do we draw the line for our students? How do we pick our battles? Great teachers can see through all the bs that is thrown their way and divert students attention back to the day's objective. However this is easier said than done. We need to keep our students on task to help them reach their full potential, but we don't need to seem like a drill sergeant. We need to push students without pushing them over the edge, and every student has a different edge. Teachers gain respect from students only when the student feels respected. If respect is not mutual you will have problems.

I feel that I am very laid back as a teacher, as long as my students are being respectful. Students appreciate it when you work with them on due dates. This makes me think, are the due dates really that important? Students learn at different speeds so why shouldn't we be flexible. I understand that we must use due dates as checkpoints to keep our students on track, but isn't it more important that the students learn the first concept well before moving to the next? We need to be able to read our students, determine if they are truly struggling, and work with them individually.

http://www.researchhistory.org/2012/06/16/maslows-hierarchy-of-needs/

We can be extremely obsessed with getting through all the material at times, thinking the students have to know it all. The top 2/3 (academically) of the class will be successful no matter what. It is the bottom 1/3 of the class that we need to worry about. Life skills are much more important than the actual content for these students. We need to be mindful that we are already doing more for these students than anyone else by developing these life skills. The content will come later, if we make learning neverending. Our students need to develop in character before we can expect them to reach the higher levels of Maslow's hierarchy.