Teaching Life by Katie

Teaching Life by Katie - October 2016 Scholarship Essay

What subject would I want to teach? At first glance, the question sounded almost whimsical in my mind – as though it might be a question of fantasy, which has a connotation of bright, almost absurdly, happy creatures in mind. However, the more I thought, the more seriousness it became. I believe teachers have a vaster amount of responsibilities than I thought before writing this, for now I realize more deeply how responsible teachers must be in order to not only teach the students the pertinent information to prepare them for the rest of their life, but also teach them how to apply it well and motivate them. In other words, I realized teachers have the heavy responsibility of preparing students to live and support themselves for the rest of their life.

Deeply considering that, I would want to teach geometry or another more advanced math class, which may be a surprise if it was widely known I hated Algebra I when I had taken it in ninth grade and that literature and composition are generally my favorite subjects. However, one may not be so surprised if one is aware I had taken geometry with trigonometry in tenth grade online through Kolbe Academy, and fell in love with the class because of the virtual classroom's atmosphere of the other students and the awesome teacher.

My geometry teacher was strict in reinforcing the deadlines, testing policies, criticalness of knowing what we were actually writing when using abbreviations, and so forth; but she had an enthusiastic attitude throughout all the classes and explained everything very well, which made me actually look forward to math class that year. She also prepared us students well for Algebra II the next year by having us do weekly algebra reviews that were not fun, but truly helped prepare us for Algebra II the next year.

Then in eleventh grade last year, I had another excellent teacher for Algebra II. Although she was not quite as strict as my geometry teacher, she still kept all of us students on top of deadlines and reinforced the importance of work ethic and understanding of the material.

Now in twelfth grade, I am taking Pre-calculus, which I was not looking forward to so much because I was afraid I would not do as well since it is a higher-level class. But – and this is probably not a surprise, given the trend of the last two years – I am enjoying the class once again. My teacher is younger, enthusiastic, and very encouraging, which makes me want to be the best I can in her class. She also explains everything in an interesting, engaging way that is easy to understand.

Because of these three truly fantastic teachers, I understand the more advanced math so much more clearly than I had in ninth grade, and they all inspired me to work hard to maintain A's in their classes. I still do love literature and composition so much because they generally allow more freedom and creativity than math and science, and that freedom of creativity is vital to me since I love thinking of new plotlines, characters, ideas, scenes, and such. However, I do not know if I would be good at teaching students such subjects since everybody is so unique and responds differently when there is a need to be creative. And so, while I deeply admire good literature, composition, and other such teachers for their ability to teach such classes that contain so much diversity and can vary so much by the class even if speaking on the same topic, I believe teaching something more structured such as math would be better in my case. In that way, I, as a teacher, would be able to effectively and better teach my students the material. Perhaps I should not be afraid to teach an English class, but I do not want any possible shortcomings of mine in that subject to badly affect my students in their abilities and learning.

Whatever I would teach, I hope very much that I would be able to clearly explain the material in an engaging manner and inspire students to willingly give their very best to the class like my last three advanced math teachers. And since I have confidence I would best be able to do that while teaching an advanced math class, an advanced math class is what I would teach if the roles were reversed – specifically a geometry course since geometry has been my favorite of the advanced math courses I have taken so far.