The Practice of Pedagogy

About three weeks ago, I was given a very rewarding and eye opening experience by the teach I'm working with this semester. When I walked into her homeroom that morning, she asked me if I'd like to give teaching from the curriculum a shot. She then gave me a meaning map worksheet to run off some copies of and I found my first road block as a future teacher, for I was completely clueless as to how to operate the copier. Eventually, the secretary in the front office helped me copy the worksheet.

Upon returning to the class with a full stack of meaning maps, I was given a chance to get my feet wet in the practice of pedagogy. One point that I'd like to emphasize here was the incredible discipline that the students had while I was instructing the lesson. This, in my opinion, is a testament to the development of a routine that my teacher my teacher had instilled in each of her students from the first day of the school year.

Everyone has a different style of teaching, as I learned. During the lesson, I attempted to be as liberal as I could with students views and opinions while sticking to the script. That isn't to say I was without flaw; in fact, I received very useful criticism from my teacher on participation and time management on this particular day. These are the kind of unconscious tendencies that teachers need to make themselves consciously aware of during their time in class. It can be easy to fall into the trap of picking on the same hands that always have the right answers without even thinking about it. It can also be easy to fall into the trap of using too many visuals, thus spending too much time on a subject without moving on to the next. A possible solution to the time management and visual issue that has recently occurred in my mind while writing this is to perhaps use premade PowerPoint presentations for the lessons that a teacher may feel need visual representations. But there are inevitable distractions that will occur throughout public school instruction that teacher's will have to cope with on the spot, which I will explore more in-depth in my time management post.

To finish off my entry on the practice of pedagogy post, I want to propose the concept of presence in a class. It is a strong opinion and belief of mine that every teacher has a presence while delivering instruction in a class, similar to the presence that an actor might have on stage. A teacher can either have a strong presence or a weak presence, the former with the capacity to keep their audience engaged, the latter without such a capacity, and without the respect of the students. The weak presence is a fatal poison to education -- if a teacher has a weak presence, students will walk all over them like a doormat. That isn't to say that a strong presence must be in the form of a strictly authoritarian classroom, but I noticed a couple time during my instruction that it was necessary to explicitly ask some of my students in a direct manner to kill off their personal conversations and give their attention to what another student had to say. Because my summer job has me working as a go-kart track attendant, and because there are rules that I have to enforce, I have had the practice of finding the sweet spot between drill sergeant and doormat. The old proverb holds very true at times: sometimes you can get more with sugar than vinegar, but I'm certainly not afraid to use the vinegar when it is absolutely necessary.