My Professional Goal

For this semester my goal is to coagulate everything into a cohesive, working model that will serve as a bedrock for my role as a teacher. In the past two semesters I studied public education in general and adolescent growth and development, and during this semester I hope to see how what I have learned is applied in the school and, more specifically, in the classroom. Closely similar to a veritable gelatinous goo, the knowledge I have accrued over the past few semesters needs to be sculpted and baked into something I can practically use. Observing a seasoned instructor, good or bad, and being reacquainted to the inner workings of a public school will, I hope, bring order to the fragmented theories, lessons, and strategies that swim aimlessly within the outer reaches of my mind.

             How did this come to be my goal? As I said, I have all these theories and strategies locked away in different regions of my brain. If I am to become a teacher at all---never mind how good---I must retrieve them, dust them off, and ready them for use. My goal is important to me now because drawing ever nearer is the time when I must come under the expectant stare of students, and when that happens I hope to be prepared. My experience with them is limited, and coupled with the fact that I easily get flustered in front of a large group of people, who knows how I will perform? I want to arrive at the ultimate comfort zone, where I understand them, and they me, and we can work together as smoothly as possible.

By taking Education in America I was introduced to a host of tools to optimize learning, including Gardner's eight intelligences, the levels of moral thinking, and the styles of learning. Using these methods I actually analyzed the tactics of my high school teachers and found that only my honors classes involved all the styles of learning; in other words, they involved more constructive, creative activities. The "regular" teachers, on the other hand, employed only the transmission model. I suppose the teachers' position was "Why should I put needless effort into my instruction if these below-average students are not fated for greatness?" Thus the cycle of mediocrity perpetuates. I've learned that adolescents need to be presented the material in differing ways, whether they are A students or D students. Also, by taking Adolescent Growth and Development I was introduced to the developmental stages through which adolescents must pass in order to become adults. Knowing that some freshmen may not be cognitively or affectively advanced enough to digest the full meaning of more demanding novels substantiates my decision not to teach, say, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

Along the same line, another goal I have is to better equip myself to inspire my students to become greater readers and writers, and to broaden their palette of words. It disheartens me to hear that adolescents’ vocabulary has diminished from 30,000 to 10,000 words in only ten years, if I’m remembering correctly. Also, last semester I said that as a teacher I will not expect my students to use the Internet because not every student will have access to it. Wrong! The Internet is no transitory gimmick and cannot easily be shrugged off. Of course, anyone can function perfectly well in the United States without ever going on-line---now, in 2000, anyway. Who knows how it will be in twenty-five years? As I said in my teaching philosophy, schools must be sensitive to technological advances, and as teachers we must do guesswork at how prominently technology will affect life in the year 2025 and beyond. By infusing the Internet into our curriculum (on-line homework) and instruction (on-line class notes), we are tendering to our students the message that technology is no longer something to passively and distantly watch progress. However much one disagrees with the prospect, having computer savvy now is equivalent to having the ability to read and write 150 years ago. Of course, now one needs both.