Final 2nd Paper

What is a teacher? According to dictionary.com, “a teacher is a person who teaches or instructs, especially as a profession.” Some people may wonder what makes a great teacher. According to Dan Brown, a teacher at the SEED Public Charter School, “Great teachers have strong relationships with their students’ families and engage in meaningful ways with the larger community.” There are many different kinds of teachers in the world. Some teachers are different than others because there are different subjects to be taught, many different teaching styles, some teachers have more knowledge in the subject they teach, and some show that they actually believe in their students. According to wisegeek.com, “the most common teaching styles are informal instruction, direct instruction, inquiry based learning, cooperative learning, and information strategies.” Teachers also have different forms of punishment for when their students act up, don’t follow directions, turn assignments in late, cheat on tests or quizzes, and for not arriving to class on time. Throughout your life you will encounter many different teachers. You will have a different opinion about each teacher but some of them might be similar to others. A major role a teacher can have in their students’ life is to inspire them to try and not to give up. Mr. Escalante from the movie Stand and Deliver and my tenth grade math teacher, Mrs. Johnson, both do a good job at helping and inspiring their students.  

            Mr. Escalante cares about and believes in his students. He shows that he cares and tries to inspire them to do well in school and to go on to college. Mr. Escalante teaches a math class at Garfield High School with students who don’t take school seriously because they have never had the motivation or encouragement to do well. He tries his best to change their outlook on education. Mr. Escalante takes the time to get to know his students. Once his students trust him and start looking up to him, they change their minds about learning and actually want to be in and try in class. In the movie it shows Mr. Escalante teaching his students before and after school and on the weekends for very little pay. It also shows him fighting to let his students retake the AP Calculus exam after they are being accused of cheating on it. When his students were accused of cheating they seemed to have lost some motivation. They didn’t want to spend as much time learning and studying but once they found out they were going to be able to retake it, they were interested in studying again. All of Mr. Escalante’s students passed the exam. Also, in the movie, it shows Mr. Escalante at Ana’s parents’ restaurant. She was going to drop out of school but he told her parents, “She’ll just get fat, waste her life away in your restaurant. You have to understand she’s a top student. Ana could go to college, come back, and teach you how to run this place.”  One thing I think his students learned from him is that if you really try you can succeed and not to give up. If a teacher didn’t believe in their students they wouldn’t go the extra distance to teach them or fight for them to have the opportunity to learn.
            My algebra teacher, Mrs. Johnson, and Mr. Escalante are similar. She also believes in and encourages her students to do well and not to give up. Mrs. Johnson is willing to spend extra time with any of her students who are falling behind or struggling in class before and after school or during lunch just like Mr. Escalante would spend extra time with his students. They aren’t the only two teachers who spend extra time helping their students. In Mike Rose’s I Just Wanna Be Average, he states, “Macfarland occasionally invited us to his apartment. It was a time in which I absorbed an awful lot of information.” Mrs. Johnson tried her best to change her students’ attitude about not liking math. She would make math problems more fun and let her students work in groups. She also knew most of her students were worried about failing the state test, the WASL, at the end of the year since we weren’t learning geometry like most of the other sophomores. She would encourage and motivate us to study and do all our assignments because it would help us do better on the WASL. At the end of the year she knew some of her students didn’t pass the test and were pretty bummed about it so the following school year she would still encourage her old students to do well in their new math classes because she knew if we studied enough and kept up on all our work we would be able to pass the WASL. She never gave up on her students. She kept checking up on us the following school year even though we were no longer in her class. Mrs. Johnson and Mr. Escalante both do a good job at showing their students that they believe in them and teaching them to keep trying even if you are struggling or fail an exam.
            Mr. Escalante and Mrs. Johnson also have some differences. One thing they don't have in common is their teaching styles. Mr. Escalante teaches informal instruction. He got to know his students and what was best for their learning capabilities. He also did some inquiry based learning. At one point in the movie, he cut up an apple, passed it out to his class, and asked them how much they had. Mrs. Johnson's teaching styles are inquiry based learning and cooperative learning. She has her students do problem solving and critical thinking while working in small groups. Another thing Mr. Escalante and Mrs. Johnson don't have in common is the amount of knowledge they have in the subject they teach. Mr. Escalante was supposed to teach computer science, but the school didn't have the supplies for the class so he had to teach math instead. Unlike Mr. Escalante, Mrs. Johnson has the supplies needed to teach the subject she's well educated in. Lastly, another thing they do different is the way they punish their students. In the movie, Stand and Deliver, one of Mr. Escalante's students wasn't following directions or doing his work so he punished him by making him sit on a chair in front of the class so everyone could see him. If Mrs. Johnson's students aren't following directions or distracting the class, she sends them out in the hall. There are many different ways a teacher can punish their students.  In A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde tells us, “Sister MPH divides the class into two groups, the Fairies and the Brownies. I always wound up in the Brownies because I talked too much.” Even though Mr. Escalante and Mrs. Johnson have some differences they both do a good job at inspiring their students.
            No matter how similar or different teachers are, they all play an important role in their students' lives. Without teachers we wouldn't be as educated about things as we are. According to Paolo Freire, “the more ‘containers’ a teacher ‘fills’ the better a teacher he is” but as you can see, Mr. Escalante and Mrs. Johnson do a great job at educating their students without “filling” their “containers”. They actually give their students a chance to learn and give them extra help if needed. Students need to take their teachers more seriously because not everyone has a chance to go to school. Some people have to learn on their own. In “Learning to Read” Malcolm X states, “I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary- to study, to learn some words” because he was in prison and didn’t have the opportunity to learn like most other people.

 

 

Works Cited

 
 

Brown, Dan. “What makes a great teacher?”

 

Freire, Paolo. “’The Banking Concept of Education’ from Pedagogy of the Oppressed” 1970

 

Harris, Bronwyn, and O. Wallace. WiseGeek. Conjecture, n.d. Web. 14 Nov. 2012. http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-some-different-teaching-methods.htm.

Lorde, Audre. “From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name”

Rose, Mike. “’I Just Wanna Be Average’ Part 2”

"Teacher." Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com, n.d. Web. 14 Nov. 2012. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/teacher?s=t.

X, Malcolm. “’Learning to Read’ excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X”