Personal Teaching Philosophy and Motivation

¶ … Personal Teaching Philosophy and Motivation Why do you want to be a teacher? What experiences have led you to want to teach in a high-need school in New York City? In the most general sense, I would simply like to accomplish something positive that benefits the human community. More particularly, my personal inclination and my relative vocational strengths lend themselves most directly to the teaching profession. A teaching career is probably the most efficient use of my talents and abilities to contribute to the human community.

Contemporary American education concepts are already beginning to incorporate a more holistic approach to primary and secondary education. In my case, this expands the potential opportunities to benefit individual students. Educational instruction will always be the primary focus of teaching, but instead of viewing classroom instruction as its sole purpose, I consider it a conduit to other important contributions that educators can make to benefit students.

Even in high-performance schools, students whose particular intellectual strengths and talents lie anywhere outside a relatively narrow range of human intelligence are at a disadvantage. Traditional approaches to primary and secondary education strongly emphasize students with the greatest aptitude in linguistics and mathematics. To the extent the educational system fails to recognize the other types of human intelligence, it unnecessarily limits the greatest benefits of educational opportunities to many students. In high-need schools, even the narrowest focus of academic performance measures require remedial attention.

Consequently, the different needs of students with comparatively higher aptitude outside of those emphasized in the traditional academic areas are even more neglected than in better-performing institutions. Therefore, one of the most important aspects of teaching is a commitment to helping students - especially those whose greatest aptitudes lie outside the main focus of most academic programs - discover the best possible application of their skills and aptitudes.

My experiences and observations since the institution of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act have reinforced my belief in the importance of the educator's responsibility to help students identify a beneficial direction for their particular sets of aptitudes, abilities, and possible vocational interests during primary and secondary education. In my opinion, the NCLB approach to education is potentially useful, in principle, but not in practice.

While the objective of ensuring minimum performance standards is commendable, the mechanism of standardized testing has generated an intensive focus on drilling and practice purely for the purpose of satisfying performance standards of the school. Working at a high-need school is an opportunity to help steer those students most at risk of abandoning continued education into a positive direction simultaneously. 2. Describe something you have accomplished that makes you proud.

What did you learn from this experience that might help you to ensure high academic achievement for all of your students? As a student, I devoted my educational efforts to certain academic subjects that interested me more than to other subject matter areas. Whereas science and mathematics were always interesting to me, I was somewhat bored by other subjects, like World History. I persevered by memorizing material covered by the curriculum, but failed to learn much of what I memorized for the sake of performance on exams.

Much later, I discovered that some of the same subject matter was available in video format and that, for whatever reason, I learned history in a much more genuine way from the audio-visual medium than from textbooks. As an adult in the education field, I realized that a moderately good understanding of world history is a functional requirement of being an effective professional educator.

In that respect, I would have to admit to a certain degree of pride in having overcome an obstacle to learning in my early education and the fact that I am, in a sense, "self taught" in several academic areas that have increased my abilities as an instructor. My professional experience and observation strongly suggests that many poorly- performing students can learn more effectively from alternate methods of instruction,.