Activity 1 & 2

Focused Free Write (Activity 1)

Pause just long enough to begin thinking about the questions below.  Don’t struggle over form or correctness.  Don’t cross out words.  Write as fast as you can for five to 7 minutes.

Consider your entire educational experience. Who was your best teacher?  What made them the best?

The math teacher who taught me in my middle school. She was the first teacher made me thinking mathematics could be fun and she was never punishing us. I got a full mark of mathematics in the first test of my middle school, that therefore I could be her assistant during my middle school. She was smart and different with other teachers, she cared whether we learned the points or not. And she is the first one makes me want to be a math teacher, just like her.

Who was your worst teacher?  What made them the worst?

I never think about this question until now. I would like to say there was a math teacher in my high school makes me hate math for almost 2 years. I am not saying that he was terrible, but I really could not catch him up in his class, and that time was the most important time before college. Admittedly, he was the best teacher in our high school, but I was not one of his best students. I remembered that in his class he would talk something has nothing to do with the topic as long as almost 40 minutes and talk something useful for 5 minutes and this 5 minutes was random inserted in those 40 minutes. Therefore I could only learn so hard in my spare time to catch up.

What impact have your best and worst teacher experiences had on your approach/philosophy of teaching/training/profession/education?

The best math teacher, Ms.Tao, makes me think that mathematics is fun and teaching it also has fun. I want to be a math teacher like her, who treats students like her friends. She was not teaching us definition or what exactly in the book, she was teaching us how to solve problem. I was lucky to have her as my math teacher and I want to get closer to my students just like her.

The worst teacher makes me refuse to learn mathematics anymore and it does not have fun when other people cannot catch you up. He did not care if we learned or not, maybe that was his style which I can understand now. But I do not want my students think I am not a responsible teacher. I wish I could know my students for real, even it was my bad, communicating is the most important way to get the feedback from students, and it is also the most efficient way to improve myself.

Educational Philosophy Focused Free Write (Activity 2)

After reading through the six philosophy resources, which one or ones do you most closely identify with? Pause just long enough to consider what you believe about teaching and learning or the philosophy that drives your thinking about teaching/training/profession/personal.  Don’t struggle over form or correctness.  Don’t cross out words.  Just get something down.  Write as fast as your can for five minutes and incorporate elements from those philosophies with which you agree.

I am interested in Existentialism most.

The key words, “Relevance” and”do your own thing” very impress me. I have to say in my studying period, there is no “individual” in a class. We are the group, teacher is an individual. And we should get used to them, that they do not have to accept that students are different. I am impressed that existentialism is telling people that “Children should be able to choose their own paths from options available to them”. Ironically, Even in college, there are uncountable students have no idea about what major did they choose, and this choice would be there their whole life. If I were a teacher, I wish to be a friend of my students. I could learn what they are thinking about and what they want, I think only if I learned that I could understand them. I do not want input my knowledge into their mind and ask they do whatever I required. They are different with each other and all I want is keep their characteristics, they are supposed to be special in the world.