Being A Teacher Within The Past Two Years

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.

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,

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 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

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.”

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

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.

My husband and I began our family shortly after I obtained an undergraduate degree. In just a few years, we had four children under the age of seven. I was managing a large household and raising our children in a stable, nurturing environment during pivotal early years. Consequently, I was not active in the workforce. As a stay at home mother, I was available to volunteer at school when my eldest child entered kindergarten fourteen years ago. After several years of serving as a school volunteer and being named the 2009 Volunteer of the Year, I gradually progressed to substitute teaching in order to continue building my educational experiences.

For nearly ten years I have wanted to go back to school to become a teacher. I had a successful career in digital media that gave me a flexible schedule to manage my growing family, yet mostly felt unfulfilled. In 2014 I was laid off from my position, and new that was my moment to try my hand as an educator. I taught as a substitute in several schools and districts in Massachusetts, then finally settled in last February as a Teaching Assistant for a kindergarten classroom at Greylock Elementary.

During my first job experience as a mechanical engineer at a pediatric hospital, I realized the importance of investing in children’s future and well-being. Six years later I began working as a substitute teacher. While working at the different grade levels I saw how

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

My past personal and professional experience started with volunteering at a childcare facility in 2008. I was only 17 old and I would come after school to help out with the different age groups from ages 2 to 6 years old and also after schools ages 7 to 12. When I would come after school I would assist the teachers with activity preparations, organization and documentation regarding the files for the students and making sure that everything was up to date. Ever since volunteering at a childcare facility I started to become more interested in teaching and how much an influence I can be when it came to teaching. My freshman year in high school had introduced me to some amazing teachers throughout my adolescent years and it continued throughout

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

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

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.