I’ve always found school to be something much more than a place to learn about books and history. I was very lucky to have been able to grow up in a learning community that gave me multiple opportunities to express myself and pushed me to challenge myself through academics and various activities outside of the realm of learning. But in order for me to have been able to have those great moments, I needed to have excellent teachers there to help guide me through all of it. It was because of those great teachers that I felt inspired to want to leave a lasting impact on the future generations of the world and the best way I saw of completing that goal was to become a teacher myself.
One of my strongest qualities is my sheer and unforgiving passion for the things that I enjoy. Being unapologetic about what makes you YOU is something that I was able to learn from my teachers as I made my way through both high school and college. Being open about yourself is one of the most difficult things to learn to overcome as a young adult and it can prevent you from making choices that lead you to a better understanding of yourself and happiness as a whole. I want to become a person that students can trust to help guide them in the best direction possible for whatever they may need. I want to motivate students to think outside the box by looking within themselves and figuring out how to accomplish their goals in the ways that best serve their own unique lives. Lastly, I want to create a classroom environment that promotes openness and respect for everyones views and thoughts. My students will be given the chance to speak their minds and participate in the construction of how certain classroom procedures are handled. I want my students to feel welcome and safe in my classroom and in order to do that, I believe that student should be deeply involved in how some aspects of the class itself is run.
My aim is to become a foreign language teacher because I feel that my ability to teach will be best used in that setting by addressing some of the most critical challenges a teacher can face. I understand that students always want to have a reason to justify why they’re learning something. When it comes to foreign language, the thought has always been that the student wants to learn how to speak another language. But as I’ve grown and observed multiple classroom settings involving foreign language, I feel that many students misunderstand what it means to really “learn” another language. I’m not aiming for just basic comprehension and memorization of vocabulary words, that’s something that anyone can do from the comfort of their own homes and leaves the student feeling like they’re wasting their time and effort in a class that isn’t giving them what they want. When I have my own classroom, my students will be exposed to a variety of content that spans multiple cultures and dialects while also allowing them to make constant connections and comparisons to their own backgrounds in order to create a personal connection with the content they’re studying.
My classroom will promote the learning of the actual course content as well cultural and social awareness in order to prepare a student for their lives outside of school. I want to create a classroom environment where students are eager to welcome something completely new and difficult into their lives. I believe that once a new language is introduced, that language becomes a part of a students life. Everything revolving around the language such as culture, history and dialect is now much more accessible to a student and I want to help my students recognize this about themselves. This will, in turn, promote personal growth and perhaps even inspire some students to venture into the world to visit some of these countries in order to help them gain an understanding of the world outside of their own homes.
Through the content of my class, my students will be given small tastes of other world views and history outside of the United States. I will ask them to give their thoughts and opinions on some controversial subjects pertaining to the cultures and countries that will be studied in our classroom, which in turn will keep them connected to the target language they are learning through the use of articles and digital media written in the target language itself.
My main goal as a teacher is to help students learn how to think for themselves while also being capable of working together with others in order to benefit their own learning. I want my class to invigorate my students’ ability to trust themselves and their own wants by using what they learn in class to benefit them outside of school. Finally, I want to teach my students how to love what they’re learning by showing them the direct benefits that being in my class will provide them. That way, they may be able to better understand and maybe even love other classes that they are taking other than my own.
"Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That's why it's called the present" - Master Oogway