Education - Personal Essay

The articles this week provide new ways of looking at the relationships involved in teaching (dialogic, caring) and the way we think about culture as we study education. Using ideas from two of the articles, discuss two very different situations in your memories of schooling: 1. a time when an educator (teacher, administrator, staff member) was able to help you feel you mattered and 2. a time when you witnessed or experienced an educator (teacher, administrator, staff member) acted in a way that made someone (could be you) feel they didn't matter. Do the articles help provide a way to encourage mattering? How or how not?

As a student you need someone who cares about your education. If you feel your educator does not care about your education, it would it would be hard for you to care yourself. In high school I was not very good in math and I didn’t care for it either. I would just come to class every day with a mindset that was not intended on doing work. I wished I could just be like the other students and just know the work the first time it was shown. I had to go over something’s over and over and over again just to kind of get it.

One year I had the perfect math teacher who dedicated his life to teaching. He gave us his full action every class. He gave use more than one example of how to do one problem because he knew that every kid learned different. I was one of the kids in the class who just needed extra help not because he was a bad teacher just because of the type of learner I am. He realized that I needed that help. He told me he would not let me flunk his class. He set up a schedule for me to meet up with him after school and sometimes even lunch. He set up different learning styles for me to learn what was going on in class. He gave me tips and pointer on how to remember formulas and how to check my answers on my own.

My Jr year of high school was a tough one. I was in science class and my classmate