I am a Middle school ELA teacher in South Carolina. I have taught 6th through 9th grade, and currently, I am teaching Honors 6th grade ELA, 6th grade ELA, and 7th grade ELA. I am also in my 10th full year of teaching. I have a half year under my belt due to graduating in December 2011 and starting a teaching career in January 2012. That first 5 months of teaching high school taught me a lot about perseverance and the importance of relationships with students.
Education and Certification
I graduated in 2011 from Southern Wesleyan University with a B.A. in Secondary English Education. I am certified in Secondary English Education and Middle School Education with the state of South Carolina. I have received both my Read2Succeed endorsement and Gifted and Talented initial certification.
Why do I teach?
I am not the typical teacher. I went back to school at the age of 38, and I graduated from college when I was 41. I often say that my age has much to do in how I approach student discipline, but it was my own children’s education that determined how I approach teaching.
I went back to school because I saw what my own children lacked. My oldest son, who has Asperger’s, was labeled a problem child who would never learn to read. In fact, they had placed him a self-contained class and coerced me into medicating him to the point that he could no longer function.
He was, in many ways, strong-willed and rebellious. Rather than teaching to his strengths or teaching him in the way that he learned best, the teachers chose to teach in the ways that they had been teaching for many years. Both of my children have very different learning styles. My oldest is a very tactile learner. My youngest is very auditory. Both, as boys, are very kinesthetic. In classes where my oldest had to sit still and learn through listening, he did poorly, and he responded by acting out.
My youngest failed a class. While he made 100s on his tests, his lack of completing homework tended to cause him to fail his classes. Homework bored him. It bored him because he knew the material, and the task seemed redundant. I had to appeal to his teacher to have him take a pretest on the vocabulary and be responsible for those words he did not know. This worked to his advantage because he had an extensive vocabulary.
My Teaching Style
My teaching style often varies between a formal teacher-centered structured style to a student-centered learning style with teacher facilitation. I am not afraid to mix things up and utilize every surface of my classroom for instruction and learning. My students are not surprised to see a different classroom layout when they walk into the classroom because they either know what to expect for the day or they will be surprised to find out what will be happening that day.
The norm has become the unexpected, and I feel that by offering up these differentiated learning opportunities, I can reach more students on their level.