My MEL experiences

• Learning Styles: Throughout my high school career I was challenged by a varying array of different teaching styles. I was always a slow reader so I dreaded all reading assignments. In most of my classes this proved to be a problem because of how many reading assignments there were. However, my European history teacher taught using a wide variety of methods. These methods included using hands on assignments, lectures and some reading assignments. This variety really helped me as a learner because it did not restrain me to learn under a system that I was poor at. The reading assignments that were assigned were short and relevant enough to keep my interest and allowed me to excel.
• Student/Teacher Relationship: I have always responded well as a learner to a friendly environment from teachers. In middle school I had a Science teacher who used humor very liberally in the classroom. I can still remember his lecture on how it’s impossible for evil geniuses to build their laboratories in volcanoes. He created an environment that made learning fun and more functional. This friendly atmosphere made the classroom more functional because every student felt comfortable in asking a question. If a student had an incorrect assumption about something, the teacher was respectful in correcting them but still used humor to show how that would be incorrect.
• Helping Students Succeed: Perhaps the poorest learning environment I have had was in a middle school English class. The environment established was an extremely serious one. Questions were usually attacked by the teacher which made students very scared to ask anything. Laughter and any kind of fun within the classroom were reserved for days that the teacher was absent. This serious environment was not at all beneficial to learning. This teacher did not help students succeed.
• Interests: Motivating students is probably one of the biggest challenges for teachers. Throughout my education motivation was usually done through Extrinsic means. This focus on grading and punishments is a decent way to get already motivated to do their work. However, in a few classes I had the teachers found new and interesting ways to motivate me to do work for more then just a good grade. An example of this is in a current events class the teacher would focus on recent events and compare them to similar historical ones. This method of using our past knowledge and comparing it to modern events really fascinated that current event class. It motivated the class to want to learn about both history and current events to be able to further compare the two. The class required regular viewing of the news for homework and it was at that point I began watching the news consistently out of interest.
• Context: Showing meaning in what is being taught can be challenging to teachers. Certain subjects have this particularly hard like in mathematics where it’s difficult to prove that students will actually need to know what is being taught. While this job was hard, one teacher I had did a particularly poor job at teaching meaning within her subject when she taught statistics. At the beginning of the school year she even addressed this issue by saying that most statistics are lies and that for most of you what you are learning will not be used outside of this classroom. This started the semester off on a particularly bad note and made it annoying to learn statistics.