Authenticity

It is very important for a teacher to be authentic. Students are able to tell when teacher is not authentic. A good teacher is someone who knows who they are, and more importantly the shows in their teaching the reasons that they first wanted to teach. I think that there is an initial spark in every effective teacher that leads them towards education.

I've had a few different moments when I decided that I wanted to be a teacher. The first time that another student came to me and asked for help with what we were learning, I discovered that I had a passion for helping people succeed in school. It didn't take long from this discovery for me to decide that I wanted to be a teacher.

The second moment that I had was the first time that I ever held a conductor's baton. It was backstage during a performance of a musical that I was in. We used the band room as our green room. Another person was holding our band director's baton, and I ended up being the one to put it back in its place. The moment that the baton was in my hand I had a moment that I can only compare to a scene in Harry Potter. When Harry first grabs his wand in Ollivander's store. I felt that same sensation when I held that baton. Ever since that moment, I have wanted to teach music.

With these two moments as guides, I want to try to be as authentic a teacher as I can be. I don't ever want to forget why I love to teach, why I love music, and why I want to inspire musicians of the future to love music the way I do. Whether a student leaves my classroom to pursue music or not, I want them to develop a love and an appreciation of music that will never die. I believe that if I can be authentic as a teacher that I will be able to accomplish this.

Disposition Blog: Compassion

Compassion is an important part of the classroom dynamic. It is important for a teacher to understand and sympathize with their individual students. I have seen many examples of compassion in my classes and also many examples where compassion has not been shown to a student or a group of students. First, though, I think that it's important to have a good solid definition of what compassion really is. According to the Webster dictionary, compassion is defined as, "sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it". Understanding this allows future teachers to understand and employ compassion in their classrooms.

An example of a teacher who employed compassion was my Calculus teacher in High School. She understood that we all would need help in the class from time to time, and would frequently checkup on us. She would often adjust her schedule to accommodate the classes ability to learn the material and grasp the concepts of a specific chapter. Her compassion and understanding allowed the class to succeed together. It did not get in the way of the standards that she set for us, which were very high.

Disposition Blog: Respect

There are many different interpretations of what exactly respect implies. One thing about it that seems to be fairly universal is that people feel the need to be respected by others, whether it be from their family, their peers, or their superiors. Respect is an especially important thing to me, because I have sometimes felt a lack of respect from some people. I know how much it can hurt to feel that you are not respected by someone. Given this, I will always do my best to make sure that I can respect my students, and that they can respect me.

Respect in the classroom in my opinion is based on a mutual understanding of the students and the teacher to work for the common goal of acquiring knowledge. There are many ways to form this understanding, and the ways it happen will vary from classroom to classroom. I have come to respect a variety of teachers in different ways and for different reasons. Among these include teachers who have chosen to treat the class as adults. Other teachers that I respect chose to take into consideration all of the student's desires and concerns.

In all of those situations, the classroom dynamic was an open and academically stimulating environment. Those are the classes that I remember the most from High School. The other important fact about these classes is that they are the classes that I learned the most in. There are still a lot of things that I remember from all of these classes.

In my classroom, I will try to set up an environment that employs both of these methods. I will always do my best to make sure that I not only treat my students as the mature adults that they are becoming. I will also try to take each student's unique learning styles into consideration, and constantly evaluate myself as a teacher for each class that I teach. In this way, I will try to set up a respectful environment in my classroom