When I tell people my goal is to be a physics teacher, I get a lot of weird looks; Furrowed brows, scrunched noses, rolling eyes. They tell me “good for you, but I hated physics, I was so bad at it.” I talked to one of my friends about ideas I have for my future classroom and he always needs to remind me that I have good ideas but “most of the kids in your class won’t care about school or physics.” He’s a bit of a downer sometimes, but he’s right.
Most kids I teach will not enter my classroom with anything even close to the enthusiasm I have for my subject. But I would wager to say of all highschool teachers. Most high schools have requirements that force their students to take a class in each of the basic subjects: english, math, science, and social studies. This means students are bound to be stuck in classes that they detest.
An exemplary teacher is able to get students engaged in their class even when those students walked in thinking they’d hate it. An exemplary teacher helps students find this inner enthusiasm by using the world around them as their classroom. An exemplary teacher engages their students by indulging their “off topic” interests and questions. An exemplary teacher levels with their students by allowing themself to take the educational journey with them.
You may not always notice an exemplary teacher the moment you walk into their classroom. In fact, I’d say most exemplary teachers go unnoticed until you’ve left their class and hindsight kicks in. The best teachers are like magicians. A master of card tricks is really just a master of directing your attention. They capture your eyes and mind and force them to something while they perform sleight of hand without detection. An exemplary teacher often teaches without the students even noticing. If you can capture the attention and enthusiasm of students in an interesting project, they probably won’t even realize they’re learning along the way.
So it can be tough to notice an exemplary teacher, but not impossible. Some signs of an exemplary teacher are, students are excited to come to class, students communicate and stay connected with the teacher after the year has ended, or students don’t always know what to expect when they enter class that day.
Well What Am I Gonna Do About It?
It hit me pretty hard the first time my friend told me that most students in my classes just won’t care. It made me really sit and think “crap, what am I gonna do about that?” Most of my students won’t grow up to be physicists, they probably won’t even be scientists, and a lot of them will never need to use physics once they leave my class. After much deliberation and bouncing of ideas off various walls, I think I’ve come to answer about what I’m going to do to be an exemplary teacher.
My students won’t use physics directly outside of my classroom, but there are so many skills that they will use that you need to understand physics. Physics is tough, that’s for certain, but the best part of the subject is that it makes sense. With proper physical reasoning, any interaction anywhere can be understood and analyzed. These are the skills I want to hone, reasoning, critical thinking, working with others and problem solving (and many others).
I plan on focusing on these aspects of physics when I become a teacher. Whenever I ask for an answer, on a test, or in discussion, I won’t accept single word answers, I’ll keep prying until I get a full explanation as to how they got to that answer. Giving the answer to a question in physics means you understand that one very specific interaction, giving the reasoning behind the answer means you can expand your thinking to many other scenarios and interactions.
I also plan on using real world examples that happen all around students. Making a force body diagram of a book sitting on a table is a great way to teach about forces, but you can teach the same concepts by considering how a plane takes off. The doppler effect can be taught by just explaining it, or I can take the class outside to a local road and listen to cars that pass by.
I think another major thing I can do to make my classroom exemplary is to create a safe space where my students feel comfortable. I want my students to feel safe not only being themselves, but feel safe to explore concepts that catch their attention and make mistakes along the way. I will encourage my students to ask questions, get distracted by random physics related gadgets in the classroom, and talk about how this class might overlap with other classes they are taking.
The biggest thing to keep in mind as I make my way through my educational journey is that it’s all a work in progress. They always say “education is a lifelong journey,” that’s true, so is the fact that it will take time for me to be the kind of teacher I want to be. Much like I’m going to encourage my students to make mistakes, I have to allow myself to make mistakes too. I don’t want to be just an average teacher that my students see and move on. This means I’m going to have to think outside the box, try things that haven’t been done in most classrooms. I’m going to mess up, probably a lot, but the more I mess up the better I’m going to be at teaching, and that’s the ultimate goal.
Great job on your first blog Tommy! You did a good job at not making the paragraphs too lengthy with enough on the page to keep the reader’s attention. It looks really professional and you display high aspiration for the future. You’re already on the path to becoming an exemplary teacher with your creativity of this page and for the examples you can do with students you provided.