Blog Assignment #9

 

What I've Learned This Year

Mr. McClung posted on his blog an article that was about his first year of teaching. This post was simply inspiring. He spoke about his experience and his advice to other teachers for their first year. The article was by far one of my favorites we’ve read, and I plan to keep it as a reference. I think this is a great article for future teachers to read to get a glimpse on what to expect and look forward to. I hope everyone enjoyed the article as much as I did.

McClung tells us that we need to know how to read the crowd. I completely agreed with that ,and that our lessons should be student centered not just centered around how we want to teach the lessons. He also said we must  be flexible and reasonable. To be flexible we must not always just do things the way we want to do them. We always need to consider  our students in our lesson plans which is very true to me. To be reasonable is probably hard for some people but we have to be that way when being a teacher. McClung said so! I agree though that we must be reasonable and not have our expectations so high that we get very disappointed in our students and discouraged with ourselves. Communicating was also mentioned. To me this is very important. We have to be able to communicate with our students and building a strong relationship with them is essential to me. McClung mentions technology as well. After being in EDM no one should be deathly afraid of technology (ha ha), but if you are don’t let it scare you just do what Mr. McClung said jump in head first! Listening to our students is important too. We need to let our students know that their opinion matters and it’s not all about us, the teachers. Mr. McClung’s last point was never stop learning. I believe that is very true. We shouldn’t stop learning because there will always be more things to learn. If you don’t want to do it for yourself do it for your students!