Being A Teacher Within The Past Two Years

As children we have many goals and dreams. Eventually, the time comes when we have to make a career decision based on our interests and goals. The choices that we make now will have a lasting effect on our lives. Like most college students I have explored many career options, but I am always lead back to the education field. Teachers have a very difficult job because they have the power to shape and inspire our future nation. Although that can be an intimidating and often scary thought, it also gives me inspiration to move ahead in pursuing my goal of becoming a teacher. I have always had a passion for children. There is nothing like watching a child grow and watching their

I have been a preschool teacher, teaching mixed age children from 18 months to 5 years, for over 10 years. I started as a work study employee, while attending the Community College of Philadelphia in 2006, to a part-time teaching assistant while attending Temple University in 2010. This led me to a lead-teacher position after graduation and then to a program coordinator. I have developed effective working relationships with children in the past years. This position has helped me improve my teamwork and interpersonal skills by cooperating with other teachers in planning teaching materials according to the Reggio Emilia approach and by sharing teaching resources. I decided that working with children, understanding and assisting in their education,

I have always adored working with children and helping others. However, I felt that becoming a teacher would not grant me satisfaction due to the amount of children in a classroom. Being inclined to assisting people individually, I would feel incapable of providing each student with the adequate attention that they deserve. With graduation looming and the fear of not

Upon first entering college, I struggled deciding at such a young age what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Through babysitting and volunteering with pre-school aged children at my church and through a school program called STARS, it became evident to me I had a love for helping children. It fascinated me to see how they viewed the world around them and how quickly they learned new truths everyday. Nevertheless, I knew I would not get the full enjoyment interacting with children as a schoolteacher because the teacher to student ratio is so large. Classroom demands would make it much more difficult to devot individualized attention to each student, and I did not like that concept. So

I have always known that I wanted to make a difference in society by becoming a teacher, due to my love of children and helping people understand various topics. I have worked with children by babysitting, instructing karate, leading children’s Sunday school, and working at a summer camp. By doing these activities I have established bonds with diverse groups of children, but at the same time, I kept a professional and respectable boundary. I have successfully worked inside a planning department alongside people of all ages and personalities in planning activities and lessons for kids.

While observing during my fieldwork assignment I had the pleasure of speaking candidly with quite a few teachers. It was Chanel Thompson’s conversation that stood out to me most. It seems we are like minded in many ways. Currently she works at Francis Elementary, a school that is currently plagued with the daunting tasks of trying to enrich not only the academic careers but the lives of its students. Francis Elementary is one of the many Houston schools that services children that fall in the bottom of the lower middle class, in terms of socio economic statuses. Like me, Chanel stated that she picked this profession because of the impact she would have on various children that she would teach from year to year. After teaching for just four short years she still feels the same way. She went on to say “Teaching will be the hardest yet most rewarding job you will ever have.”

When I finish my associates in Arts at Greenville Technical College, I plan to transfer to get my Bachelors (B.A.) in Early Childhood Education from University of South Carolina- Columbia. I chose this career because I love children with a passion and every job I’ve had has been with children involved. Being in the presence of children makes me happy. I also chose this career because I know that when I wake up in the morning I will not dread going to work every day, I will gladly get up an strive to make a difference in their lives. I want to be an impact on as many of their lives as I can by being a part of their life and teaching them. I want to be someone they look up to, someone “who inspires and encourages us [them] to strive for greatness, live to our [their] full potential and see the best in [them]” (Teach). To become a teacher takes a lot of hard work and motivation.

After hearing Kristina’s background of her road to becoming a teacher, I began to ask her questions about her teaching experience. The first question that I asked Kristina was what influenced her decision to become a teacher? Kristina’s response to this question connected greatly to my own influences. She had known that she wanted to teach from about second grade. Kristina nannied and babysat for multiple kids when she was younger. The experience she had with watching kids had an impact on what she wanted to do in her life. Having the opportunity to relate to children

To say that "I am extremely passionate about working with children" would be an enormous understatement in regards to my personal experiences, ideologies and self-proclaimed purposes in respects to working in public schools. Being passionate about ones every day line of work is a huge deciding factor for most of us when it comes to “what we want to be when we grow up.” Conversely, it was quite simple for me, you see the rewards of teaching truly lie in the outcomes of one’s teaching. Knowing that from the first day of school, what I do and how I do it will have a domino effect on hundreds of lives throughout my career as an educator. In hopes to not only work in a field that I both admire and aspire to be a part of, I am also driven to one day be that teacher in which my students can look back and say “Miss. Chadwick really motivated me to be a better learner, artist, writer” and hopefully “a better person.”

John Locke was the forefather of the Educational Constructivist movement, which theorized that children and learners construct their personal knowledge in both social and individual situations. Though his opinions were often disputed, Locke had many opinions and theories of the habits and social conventions for the education of young children. Specifically, and perhaps most importantly, he believed that “It is more accurate to think of the child’s mind as a blank slate, and whatever comes from the mind is from the environment” (Crain 7). This ‘blank slate’, or tabula rasa idea founded the theory of nurture. According to his theory, as babies we are born without knowledge of what we should fear or how we should act, it is up to our environments to teach us how to act and behave.

Postman (1985) suggests the idea of ‘childhood’ was social construction from after the 16th century, suggested by sociological institutionalists such as James Locke (Archard, 2015). Until that time, children as young as 6 were not regarded as fundementally different to adults, there were no special rights for a child, nor institutions to nurture them and although they were recognised as smaller than adults, yet this gave them no special status. Furthermore Archard (2015), suggests Rousseau is widely credited with pioneering a modern view of childhood, identifying children as a moral innocence, close to nature and easily corrupted by social actions and conventions although this could be seen as a westernised

Ever since I was a little girl, I knew that in my future I wanted to become a teacher. I always looked up to my teachers, especially the ones I had in elementary school. I even played 'school' with my friends and pretended I had my own classroom. I loved being in charge. During a summer, I was given the opportunity to work as an Energy Express mentor and work with a group of eight children. This was one of the most wonderful experiences I have ever been through. I was a mentor to help guide the children, and by the end of the summer I felt as if I had really accomplished something. I am planning to pursue a career in elementary education. I love children, and just knowing that as a

The child has not been perceived like an individual until the work of eighteen century philosophers Locke and Rousseau, who expressed their thoughts on paper about the child's ability to

In our community everyone has their own ways of learning. Knowing how people interact with one and other, and understanding the diverse individual in our community helps to give everyone a fair, and equitable education in our society. Knowing how different people learn and function other than yourself helps us as humans understand others and how they have the ability to learn. Even though, the way people think about things may be different than your own thinking, and act as they find a common ground in our diverse and changing world.

From parental rearing, one can see that a child benefit’s more when naturally raised with self-guidance. John Locke’s view suggests that “childhood is an imperfect state and education built upon the blank slate” (Albanese, 2016, pg.8); nurture. Through Rousseau’s view “childhood is considered care free and special, and education stifled and detracted from a child’s freedom and humanness” (Albanese,2016, pg.9); nature. Rousseau believes that a child is born free but is in chains everywhere. The natural disposition that a child is born with is affected by parental rearing. When children come into the world parents have a sort of rule and jurisdiction over them. They succumb to patria protesta, the obligation of parents to steer their children in the right direction; saving them from sin. Children are born free, and are innocent, and it is