Inspiring Educators

I've wanted to be a teacher longer than I've been in school. It's an inarguable fact that my older sister, Brianna, is the reason for this, although my father played a role in it as well. Because of this, I can't say that any of my teachers inspired me to become an educator. I can say that they inspired the kind of teacher I want to be.

Like every student, I've had teachers I loved and whose classes I loved as well as teachers whose classes I dreaded. I was lucky enough, as I hope most students are, to have had a number of exceptional teachers.

My freshman science teacher, Mr. Danala, was one of the first teachers to truly inspire me. He created a classroom where everybody seemed involved, in large part due to his amazing skills in forming relationships with his students. As freshmen, we were pretty apprehensive. Although most of us knew each other, it was still new in that none of us had ever taken a high school science class before. The class was well-structured, with clearly defined expectations, which was, and still is, an important thing for me as a learner. Another thing Danala excelled at was bringing real-world applications to the things he taught. Science, is, of course, always all around us, but when classes are taught strictly in terms of theories and definitions, students can sometimes lose sight of this. Despite being fascinated by science, I often feel more confused than anything else in science classes, and he was able to make the concepts not only more understandable but also enjoyable.

My freshman English teacher, Ms. Raley, is an inspiring educator and a truly amazing woman. As an aspiring English educator, I learned a lot from her class, both about content knowledge and about how I want to teach. The aspect of her teaching I found most inspiring was the way she used her English classroom to teach students more than figures of speech, literary devices, and other mechanical knowledge. It was in her class that I was first given the chance to practice using writing as a vehicle for social justice and as a way to trigger change on a broad scale. I've always seen one of the primary values of language arts skills to be the fact that they give students a way to be analytical of the information that surrounds them when forming their thoughts, opinions, and beliefs as well as the way it allows them to express themselves with these things in mind. I feel that this is something her class taught me in many ways, as we read about race, disability, and other inequities in our society while simultaneously learning about the more technical side of reading, writing, and analysis. Even as we learned the power of the written word, though, we learned that this is not the only way to express our thoughts. For example, for one project, I was required to choose a variety of mediums to express my knowledge of a novel I read, including character journals, an alternative book cover, and a playlist.

My school's Spanish teacher, Mr. Parrett, with whom I had Spanish class all three years of high school, will always be one of my favorite teachers. He has both a wealth of knowledge and a fierce passion for his subject that engage even the most hesitant students. As a former member of the Peace Corps, he traveled to many Spanish-speaking countries and, because of this, he has a better understanding of their cultures and of how connotations change between countries. Beyond subject knowledge and even student engagement, the relationships he creates with his students are the kind I aspire to have. His class is built on the respect he has for his students and his unwavering belief that we can succeed. This support led his students to have a lot of respect for him, and I know my peers look back on his class fondly.

The resources Mr. Parrett shared with me are based in the content he teaches, but the theories within them are applicable to other subjects as well. He bases his teaching around TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) and TCI (Teaching Comprehensible Input). Specifically, he says books by Stephen Krashen and experts on TPRS and TCI are a great resource for people who plan to teach a second language. There is also a lot of information online about these theories as well as nearby conferences. One exceptional online resource for TPRS and TCI is Altamira.

Contacting these teachers was not difficult through their school accounts. Although they didn't all reply, I got my first reply in less than twelve hours. Something I found striking about the experience was how much gratitude I had to share with them. My class worked together senior year to get my Spanish teacher a yearbook which we all signed, and I still had things I wanted to say to him. I was also surprised by the gratitude they had for the messages. Sometimes it seems as if these teachers must know how wonderful they and their classes are, but it seems this is rarely the case.