My Mel Experiences

•          Student/Teacher Relationships: My favorite teacher I have ever had was my high school Spanish teacher, Mrs. Soucy. I had a great relationship with her and I could tell that she really cared about me. Whenever I seemed upset she would ask me what was wrong and she was always very considerate when something came up that interfered with homework. Although I had a very friendly, casual relationship with her, I respected and looked to Mrs. Soucy as a mentor more than any of my other teachers.
•          Helping Students Succeed: My least favorite teacher in high school was my Functions/Statistics/Trigonometry and AP Statistics teacher, Mrs. Butler. She did not seem to care at all about student success, but rather was focused on getting through the text book despite the fact that more than half of the class usually failed the final test of the units. She did not seem to care much about encouraging success using differentiation because she always used the same basic formula; each class started off by going over last night’s homework and the rest of the class was notes. If there was extra time at the end of class, this time was to be spent doing homework quietly. She did not even let us listen to music with earbuds while working on homework because she claimed there were studies saying it was detrimental to learning, although she never provided us with more information about that supposed study.
•          Hands on: I have always hated doing hands on activities. I have never found these activities to be valuable, although I know that other benefit from them immensely. Luckily for me, I did not have many classes in high school that focused on hands on learning. Even my science classes were fairly writing and reading based rather than experimental. Other than sciences, I took mostly AP classes, which are fairly limited due to the emphasis on preparing for the AP test in May. In my AP classes we did not have a lot of time for activities and projects, which I did not mind.  However, I know many other students may have done better in the classes if hands on activities were incorporated.
•          Autonomy: Another one of my favorite teachers in high school was Ms. Carter. I took freshman history, AP U.S. History, and AP Psychology with her and loved the AP classes I took with her. Ms. Carter assigned a lot of projects; however, she typically would give us a list of project choices and allowed us to choose which kind of project we wanted to do. She also allowed us to think of our own project that was not on the list and get it approved by her. I think this made projects a lot more fun. It was always interesting to see which project other students chose to do and there was always something on the list that appealed to everyone. Looking back on this, it is apparent that she must have included projects that would appeal to a variety of learning styles.
•          Context: My Spanish teacher, Mrs. Soucy, would always try to convince us how useful knowing a second language is outside of the classroom. One way she did this was taking us on a field trip to do a Spanish scavenger hunt in Lowe’s. Although it sounds like an odd field trip, it was interesting to see how many of the Spanish signs we could read in the store and see if we knew our vocabulary well enough to be able to read the clues and find the products we needed. Afterwards, we went to a local Mexican restaurant and had to order in Spanish. It was a fun way to use the language outside of the classroom and see how valuable it can be in the real world.