“As a teacher, I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous.  I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or deescalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.”
- Dr. Haim Ginott –

      During my first educational class at Appalachian State University, I received the above quote by Dr. Haim Ginott.  As a beginning student in the
field of teaching, this quote struck a chord within me and has helped to develop my philosophy of teaching.
    All students enter the doors of the schoolhouse with more than just math and spelling on their minds.  School is a safe haven for some students, for others it is a prison.  The one thing that is constant however is that we are their teachers, their role models.  The one person between eight in the morning and three in the afternoon, they can look to for guidance or support.  It is so important that every student that enters your classroom feels that he/she is accepted and is comfortable to express himself/herself.  As a teacher it is my responsibility to provide that stability for my students.   I must treat every student with the love and respect that I wish for in return.  So often, teachers regard students as someone in which they can look down at or speak down to.  I would rather look at or speak directly to a student, get on their level, and make them understand that I also know how it is, I am not the “terrible evil grown up” that they perceive me to be.
    Children can be very impressionable. They are often torn between right and wrong and the pressure of peers.  As a teacher I will do whatever is in my power to help students learn right from wrong and how to make good decisions.  There is no guarantee that as a teacher, I can stop students from making all the wrong decisions, but I can educate them on the fact that they do have decisions that they can make.   For some students, a teacher may be the only positive role model that they have.
    Also a teacher's attitude toward the classroom or a specific subject can make or break a child.  A teacher that enters the classroom with spunk and fire will grasp the attention of a student and retain it far more than someone who just sits in the back of the room and hands out assignments; these duties are reserved for substitutes.  In the world of standardized testing, it is easy to get caught up in teaching to the test and loose all creativity in the classroom.  I believe that there are ways to incorporate both creativity and the standardize test to create a positive and fun environment for the students to learn.
     The most important aspect of teaching is not the curriculum that we teach but the student.   As a teacher, I intend to be a positive role model, make learning fun, and never loose sight of the fact that I hold each students desire to learn in.  This will occur in the way that I react to each one of them and the subjects that I teach.
 
 

Michael Thompson