Reasons for Teaching

Today I am going to focus my blog on the reasons that I have decided to teach.  Although I found today's readings and class discussions to be interesting, I found that I related more to the readings from "Educational Foundations" that we had for Thursday last week.  As I read the experiences that other teachers had with the students in their classroom, it got me thinking a lot about why I chose this career and why I think that it is the best fit for me.   The “Death at an Early Age” section of the reading really stood out to me as I thought about the type of teacher I want to be.  It angered me to read about the art teacher who treated Steven so poorly and made me question why someone like this would ever want to become a teacher in the first place.  This idea led me to think about my own experiences and it was also what helped me decide what to choose for a prop.  When I was just beginning school, I remember doing well in all of the subjects except math.  I really struggled with my basic math facts and disliked that math was all about numbers.  The teacher I had for kindergarten was a tough, unsympathetic woman that seemed to be the opposite of what you would expect for a kindergarten teacher.  As I grew up and had some of the best teachers in math, I realized that I was actually pretty good at it and really enjoyed solving the problems.  This was why I chose a calculator as my prop.  It is funny now to think that the subject I once despised is now the subject that I will be teaching my future students.   I think another reason why I liked math so much as I was growing up was because there was always more than one way to solve a problem in math, even if you were told to do it a certain way.   This tied into my group’s discussion today about the common system of education.  We talked about how education is often focused on what to learn rather than how to learn.  I think it is very important that students learn to think for themselves and I believe that it should be completely acceptable if a child solves the problem a different way than is asked of them in class.