Teaching Students To Experience by Celeste

Teaching Students To Experience by Celeste - August 2017 Scholarship Essay

If I were a college professor, I would teach what I am most passionate about. Teaching my own interests is important because I can always tell which of my teachers are enthusiastic about their subject, and those teachers always have the most engaging classes. I would want my students to feel the same excitement as I do about my subject. As for my passion, it would most likely be any of the sciences. Science is very close to my heart, as it is an attempt to explain everything around us. Explanations are essential to understanding, and understanding is essential to living. I say this because I believe that to live is to experience, and to experience is to understand.

In all honesty, though, I would be willing to teach anything, as I have a wide array of interests and passions. I would feel comfortable with any subject, as long as I teach it in such a way that my students would know how to the lessons in real life. If I taught biology, for example, I would make sure that I teach the students how it applies to real life, even, and especially, if they aren't planning to major in biology. Knowing why we learn certain things and how to use them in our lives is so much more beneficial than simply learning the subject. If we only cram information into our heads to pass the final exam, we will never truly know how this education affects our lives. We won't know how we interact with it on a daily basis. Class lessons become much more pertinent when we experience them instead of solely storing information in our brains to discard after exams.

I suppose my only requirement for a subject is that it has to be something that my students can confront head-on. It has to be something that students can identify simply by going out in the world and looking at life in a way that they haven't before. It has to be something the students can challenge and question and ponder, embracing the inevitability of it in our world. Once they know how the subject presents itself in our lives, they will see everything in a new light. It's important to me that everyone knows how subjects are connected and that everything has a place in the world. No knowledge is useless if we truly understand it. Being aware of how everything in the world, in the universe, relates to every other is how we expand our awareness and understand the world around us.