As a teacher, one should have a philosophy based around teaching. This involves different rules or ideas that you expect others and yourself to follow during the span of your career. My first and most important philosophy idea is that I believe that students should feel safe in my classroom, as well as the school in general. There was a situation at my middle school where a parent at the high school just down the street thought that a student brought a gun to school. It was May 4th, so he dressed up as Darth Vader (which he shouldn’t have), and one of his props, the mom, thought it was a gun. This formed a huge situation where tons of police were called. Everyone had to go on lockdown, including our school because we were close to the middle school. I remember sitting in my homeroom class with all my friends and having to hide in the lockdown position so that we would be safe. Looking at my teacher, I could tell she was nervous; everyone was. But she did a great job of keeping us calm, following exactly what she was trained to do, and being there for us. As a teacher that is what you need to do in those situations. Even though it might have been scary for her at the time, she had to put a brave face on to show her students that there is nothing to worry about; that her classroom was safe for all the students. My second most important idea in my teaching philosophy is that I have respect for my students, so they should have respect for me. There have been many times where a teacher has told my class this. That if she is talking, we should respect her and be quiet. This also goes for when a student is trying to talk and other students are not listening and speaking out of turn. I remember one time I got called on and there were a few students that were having a conversation while I was trying to say something. My teacher stopped me for a moment and told the students that were talking out of turn that it was very disrespectful of them. They then sat there quietly and let me finish what I was saying. I think respect is very important in the classroom, and it goes both ways. My third philosophy is that all students are willing to learn, but they all learn in different ways. As a teacher I believe that, as Dr. Riggle says, we should meet the students where they are. Math is not my strong-suite when it comes to school. I struggled, but I was also embarrassed when the rest of the kids at my table totally understood what was going on and I didn’t. I remember one time my teacher came over to me and asked how I was doing on my math problems that day. I told her that I really didn’t understand what was going on. Instead of her not helping me, or giving me the same examples she gave to the whole class (that clearly I wasn’t understanding), she changed the way of understanding the material in a way that helped me learn it better. I was more of a visual learner, so by changing the style of learning to fit my learning abilities and making it more personal for me, I was able to grasp what she was saying a lot better. Some of my middle school and high school teachers would even let students stay after school in their rooms to be able to get more practice or a better understanding of what they weren’t getting in class that day. All these examples are ways that teachers can help students learn by meeting them at their level of understanding.
