Ever since the day we are born, one is taught by many
teachers. First of all our parents, secondly our siblings; later on other
family members start to take form; grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles. All
of these people teach us many things in our young lives; they lay the
foundations to whom we will become. At the starting of schooling we learn
structure; how to walk in lines, fill out worksheets and pay attention. I, like
every other American child, has traveled through the paths of public education encountering
many teachers with their unique ways of portraying knowledge. Over the summer,
I was exposed to two different but effective te5aching styles.
Enrolling in my first college classes during the summer
was intimidating. I was taking math 99 and English 99. I honestly did not know
what to expect. I found both teachers to be in their late 50’s/ early 60’s,
they had been doing this for year and were well rehearsed on the curriculum
along with what methods were effective. My math teacher, Mary Anne, was all
about getting through the chapters of the book. In contrast, my English
teacher, Mrs. Richardson, taught more along the lines of the power of thought.
These classes were the “express” courses because they were only six weeks long
instead of 11. The advantage of this is
you earn the credits quickly, but the disadvantage is the fact that 11 weeks’
worth of work was crammed into twenty-three class periods. As one can imagine,
this created a stress filled summer.
Promptly at nine am my math course began. Mary Anne
started each session with yoga breathing techniques. We would stand behind our
chair and focus on our breathing and only thinking about math. She would
instruct us to block everything in our lives out and only focus on math. After
our moment of peace, we started off with an entry quiz and then we would begin
a rigorous two and half hours of math. I quickly learned that this course was
not for slackers. We covered 2 chapters a day, receiving a couple worksheets
with each chapter and about 30 online practice questions per chapter. The only
way to receive credit for the in class exercises was if the questions were100%
correct. To make it 100% correct it involved turning it in multiple times and
getting it back with red marks and attempting to re-due the questions and
turning them back in. This process would go on until all the questions were
correct. The disadvantage to this was how time consuming it was, but the
advantage was one would receive 100% in that category going into the final
grade. If this system did not work this way most students probably wouldn’t end
up passing the class. Mary Anne made sure we had plenty to do outside of class;
a typical evening involved about 3 hours of intense study of the material, completion
of the worksheets, and the online assignment. Mary Anne’s style of teaching would
be defined as strict; maybe even old fashion because of the teacher lecturing
and the students frantically scribbling down notes.
In comparison my English teacher Mrs. Richardson assigned
a lot less homework, which was nice because I had plenty in math.
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