Creating a Unit Plan, and failure

Graduate School is starting to catch up with me, I'm constantly doing something, but I told myself I'm not going to be THAT person that always complains about how horrible their live is and how much life as a grad student is. Between an assignment for Foundations of Education and Education Psych, it's been a long week, something I can only imagine will be every week when I'm dealing with students, grading papers, working school events, and holding school hours.

I've been doing a lot of reading this weekend about how to teach students with disabilities and students that are failing in a subject when I read up on an uncoming documentary on HBO that premieres this Tuesday at 7:30. I Can't Do This But I CAN Do That deals with family of students that have learning disabilities and how their family can help them overcome these issues.

Keeping Motivation High

It is vital for American Educators to be able to keep student motivation high in their classrooms, but enivitably there will always be students that are less than interested in your course, or in school in general. How do we as teachers get these students to respond to our teaching? How do we show them that education has facets in all of our lives regardless of what career path we take?

This is the question that we will need to ask ourselves as future educators? How do we make our students WANT to learn, want to value their education?

For me I know that I need to collaborate my lesson plans and units with something that my students can relate you. I know that History is generally thought of to be a "boring" subject and connecting in importance of knowing about the past with the future is vitally important to our development as a nation and as a single American people.

The article posted below gives ideas and case studies for the application of real word projects into interdisciplinary education. Examples like working with service learning, analyzing natural disasters and their effects, and the use of all 4 major subjects to show how interconnected education can be is something I will strive for was a teacher.

http://publications.sreb.org/2010/10V04w_BestPractices_Blending_Instruction.pdf

Teaching Global Issues in American Schools

My Girlfriend's mother is a former educator that now works for a non-profit think tank in Atlanta working on the integration of technical education in High Schools, specifically taking the students that want vocational education and showing them the advantages of getting at least an Associate's degree in the field for the benefits of advancement. She recently sent me a nice book about the working with vocational students and helping push them into higher educational work and the challenges they face.

How do you get a student to go from wanting to be an auto mechanic to thinking that American history would be important for the rest of their lives? The answer was dealing with students individually and letting them explore their own niches in the subject, in this example, exploring the relationship between American and foreign automakers and the unique situations that helped the American car industry.

Here is a link to the authors blog as well as the book: http://blog.esrnational.org/bid/29183/Introducing-Getting-Classroom-Management-RIGHT

What makes a good teacher?

A couple thoughts on what it takes to be a good teacher:

Determination

Persistence

Flexibility

Creativity

Content Knowledge

Stamina

Head-Strongness

Fairness

Positive

Patience

Organized

I think of all these I need some patience. I feel like I will expect my future students to be as well versed and as quick to grasp concepts as when I teach them and I will need to be able to be patient and know that this is their first time going over the material.

Secondly, I feel like I need to have the determination to get through an entire school year. It is a long time to be dealing with the same students for 9 months and I know there will be some mornings that I will dread having to get out of bed at 6am to get off to class. I know that I want to do this, I want to make this happen, I want to teach. I just want to get out there and do it.