Becoming+a+Teacher+by+Erin+Ferguson

Erin Ferguson Composition G Mr. Bouton 4/17/09

Becoming a Teacher I have never been a very talkative person in class nor one to jump up at the opportunity to speak in front of a group of people, large or small. I preferred to stay inside my comfort zone and only do things I was absolutely confident about. When I first heard about Summerbridge Manchester at an assembly in middle school, the statistics about the percentage of Derryfield students who were involved before they graduated made me wonder whether I would one day be a teacher. I put it out of my mind then, because high school seemed so far away, but before I knew it I was a 10th grader and eligible to apply to teach. By that time, I had already had some leadership experience so the challenge of being of Summerbridge teacher did not seem as daunting.

My introduction to teaching was in 7th grade when I started helping out with a Girl Scout troop of girls who are five and six years younger than I. During the first year, I started out my usual quiet self, but as I got to know the girls better it became easier to joke with them and help with activities for their troop meetings. As they grew older, they were easier to teach because their attention spans had increased, and I had also grown more confident in working with younger children through practice.

One of the aspects of Summerbridge, now called Breakthrough, that I liked when I was applying was team teaching; I was able to slowly adjust to teaching in an academic setting, and one person was not solely responsible for teaching a group of fifteen to twenty middle schoolers as a new teacher. Breakthrough has taught me how to create lesson plans that will both captivate the attention of young students by being interesting and hands-on, and also contain an important skill that the students can bring back to their work in their own schools. I have also learned how to work together with a lot of different people my age in my role as a teacher.

At the same time that I was a first year teacher at Breakthrough, I also participated in the World of Difference program at Derryfield, in which a small group of people talked about the issues of our community and then once a month held discussions about these issues with classrooms of peers. The hardest part of A World of Difference was getting up the courage to discuss issues with my own peers, and students a grade older than me. As in every classroom, some students were very outspoken and opinionated; I had to make sure that these people did not dominate the discussion and other people were heard. The confidence and classroom management skills I gained in teaching my peers helped me immensely with Breakthrough, where the kids were younger and I had a lesson plan that was simple and straightforward.

As I gained experience teaching in different settings, I noticed and acquired the traits that I believed made a good teacher, based on what I had observed of my own teachers at Derryfield. Over the years, the best teachers that I have had were enthusiastic about the subject they were teaching, and genuinely seemed to love their job. Always organized and prepared for class, they were still able to adapt their lesson plans slightly based on the time of day, recognizing that students were still tired during first period or extremely energetic during last period. Perhaps the most admirable trait about excellent teachers is their confidence in front of a class, sharing the vast knowledge they have of the subject they are teaching. A teacher can not be a quiet, shy, self-conscious person and be able to lead a discussion well; through my different teaching experiences I had to overcome these difficulties and transition from self-consciousness to self-confidence.

This year over spring break, I went to China knowing that I would be spending some time in two Chinese schools, but I had no idea what this entailed. The first school we went to was the Dandelion School, a junior high school in Beijing for migrant workers’ children where we were practically thrown into a classroom the first day and told to teach the students. That day I learned a lot about improvising, but I was also able to use the skills I had developed from Breakthrough this year and last.

The students I was teaching were only a year younger than me, but because English was not their primary language, I had to slow down my speech and I became a lot more conscious about what words I was choosing to teach them with and how I articulated my sentences. Teaching the Chinese students was very different from what I was used to from Breakthrough, World of Difference, or Girl Scouts, but I learned to adapt my teaching style just slightly, just as I had in the past as the age groups of whom I was teaching changed. Most of the time, however, the adaptation of my teaching style in China was learning how to improvise and create a lesson plan on the spot, since we had either very little or no time to plan before each day’s classes.

My favorite part about teaching the students at the Dandelion School was the teaching that took place outside of the classroom, especially our discussions during lunch, during which we all learned about each other’s cultures. I would ask them questions about their favorite American and Chinese foods, and one day they asked me to teach them an American song. They already knew a lot of American songs that we ended up singing together, like Do Re Mi and Jingle Bells, and we spent half of recess that day just singing. Inside and outside of the classroom, I learned a lot about Chinese culture in my three days at Dandelion, and was exposed to a whole different side of the Chinese school system during our stay at Blue Tassel, a boarding school in Suzhou.

The high school students we taught at Blue Tassel were very different from the students at the Dandelion School because the majority of them did not care for school and so did not pay attention to us when we were teaching. A lot of students were, unexpectedly, stereotypical rich boarding school kids who were at the school only because their parents sent them, not something one would expect to see in China where everyone is supposed to be smart and hardworking. Teaching at Blue Tassel required more adaptation; I had to learn how to be strict with the students in order to get through a lesson in the short amount of time we had each day, and encourage the unmotivated to participate.

On the night of the last day we taught at Blue Tassel, the school invited us to talk to students and parents about the qualities necessary for an American to be successful, and they planned to share what they thought made a Chinese person successful. Two Derryfield students were going to be speakers, so, thinking this would be an excellent opportunity to take a risk and step out of my comfort zone, which I had been doing more and more of during the trip, I volunteered. Although that night was probably one of the most nerve-wracking experiences of my life, I was able to use the confidence and improvisation skills I had gained from teaching the Chinese students in the discussion that night.

Over the past few years I have taught many different groups of people, from my peers, to young Girl Scouts, to Breakthrough students, and Chinese students, and have learned to adapt my teaching style depending on whom I am teaching. Although I can still be a bit quiet in an unfamiliar setting, I am getting steadily faster at gaining my confidence in novel situations, and the more I practice, the more confidence I will gain and the better I will become at teaching. Gaining confidence through working with Girl Scouts and Breakthrough has not only helped me become a good teacher, but has also made me a better student, one who is more willing to speak up in class discussions. In the future, I want to study psychology and get a job working with younger people, whether I become a professional teacher or a psychologist. But whatever path I go down, I hope that I will be able to use the skills and confidence I have developed from teaching during high school in my career in the future.