My Teaching Philosophy

The way I approach teaching is first and foremost, fluid. As i read texts and critics and come to know the philosophies of other's, I adapt my ideas in consideration of what I learn that serves and excellent education.

There are a few constants, however, that I consider paramount to most of the new information I read about teaching. The first is some variation of a phrase I heard in my first week of 'teacher training' during TFA summer institute: 'if you fail to prepare you prepare to fail.' This was meant in a simple sense in terms of lesson planning- go into a classroom to teach without the most solid of plans for your lesson and students are bound to be riotous. It's as though they can smell teacher laziness and are harsh punishers. On a more in depth level though, planning is incredibly important for more than crowd management purposes. It is crucial that curriculum planning, followed by unit planning and then lesson planning informs every choice I make in my classroom so that I have a solid idea of the arch of learning and series of objectives I want my students to master. It is often assumed that students have no interest in this part of their education, that they prefer to enjoy each of their classes like a play in which they have no knowledge of backstage. On the contrary, I find that my students are far more invested when they understand how their learning builds on itself and why each class' objective is something I consider important to their education, and so should they. Of course not all students need this kind if incentivizing to want to learn each day, but in my South Bronx High School where students in 13th and 14th Grades are regularly enrolled in my 10th grade class, they absolutely do.

A second element that I consider pivotal in my teaching philosophy is that I relentlessly question whether what I teach is interesting to me personally. The best teachers I had growing up were those who you could practically smell the enthusiasm on: Ms. Roots' passion for Hamlet, Mrs. Harper's fervor for James Joyce, even the clear joy Algebra gave Ms. Sharma-Yun, these were things that inspired me as a student to throw myself into learning in the hopes that I too would get such joy from academics in the way they did. Not even the best teacher can imitate this quality when reading Lord of Flies for the hundred and eighty seventh time. I have had the pleasure of being able to design my own curriculum and hence I filled it with texts I knew that not only my students would enjoy reading but I would enjoy introducing them to. I am aware this is a privilege in our school system that is being saturated by anchor and scripted curriculum, a trend I disagree with.

Lastly, I find myself an active member of the 21st Century (involuntarily) and a focus on using technology to my students' every advantage is something that enables many other smaller elements of my teaching philosophy. This may entail writing essays on Google documents and partaking in virtual conferencing in the classroom to show students right on their screens exactly what to work on, or it could just mean including a lesson in my unit on how to a send a professional email. In either case, I strongly believe that would be doing my students an injustice if I pretended that the classroom was a place for old school methodology and did not expose them to the many ways in which tech is an advantage to them.