Respect

It is my strong affirmation that every individual brings an equal amount of knowledge and experience to the classroom. This includes the students’. While I may bring with me the knowledge of mathematics and educational pedagogy and the experience of graduating high school and college, it is my strong belief that what my students bring is just as valuable. I feel that before I can teach a child I must know them, so I spend the first few weeks of school really getting to know and understand each of my student’s individual lives on a day-to-day basis. Through this process their stories of survival, levels of responsibility and abilities to overcome adversity, time and time again, constantly astonish me.

This is why I am forever trying to provide opportunities for my students to display the wealth of knowledge and experiences they bring. Through our project based learning curriculum, students problem-solve using their natural given talents as I group them based on ability and encourage parent/family involvement on a daily basis. In addition, I design projects that require students to teach the class about their culture and about a talent that is unique to them. The culture lesson requires our class to create a culture quilt, which is mathematically sound. Each student is responsible for designing one panel to represent them, their family and cultural background. They then present their panels to the class and at the end we sew them together to represent the diversity and wealth of our classroom. The talent lesson project requires students to select a hidden talent, hobby or pastime that they enjoy taking part in. They create a ‘work of art’ of their choice (collage, video, rap etc) to represent this to their classmates. They then must teach the class about their talent, hobby or pastime.

My students often comment about how they have never done something like this in their classrooms before. To me, it is a shame that teachers so seldom take advantage of all the resources they are given, including the students, in the classroom. Through these experiences I see my students, who have often been on the probation side of academics, grow as individuals and become proud and confident young people.