Excellent Essay Writings About Teachers
0 Comments / 1 / By Nimi
"I have learned that when I am comfortable, complacent, and sure of myself I am not learning anything. The only time I learn something is when my comfort, my complacence, and my self-assurance are threatened. Part of my own strategy for getting through life, then, has been to keep myself, as much as possible, off balance. I loved being a student, but being a student meant walking into jungles where I was not sure my compass worked and didn't know where the trails might lead or where the tigers lurked. I grew to like that temporary danger. I try to inject some danger into my own courses, if only to keep myself off balance. When I feel comfortable with a course and can predict how it will come out, I get bored; and when I get bored, I am boring. I try, then, to do all I can to keep myself learning more. I do that in part by putting myself in threatening situations."
tion that first-year college students in a required writing course could, first of all, tell good writing from less-good writing, and, second, that they could articulate the principles that made the good essays better. My students knew I was taking a risk in setting the course up that way, but because they knew that my risk was based on my own faith and trust in them, they wanted me-they wanted us-to succeed.
We teachers have something called academic freedom. Too many of us interpret that to mean the freedom from firing. I suggest that we should interpret it rather as the freedom to take chances in the classroom. I love taking risks. It keeps some excitement in what is, after all, a pretty placid profession. I like to try things that can fail. If there is no chance of failure, then success is meaningless. It is usually easy enough to get permission to take risks, because administrators usually like it when teachers organize interesting and unusual activities. For some risky activities it may be best not to ask permission, partly because the risks that good teachers take are not really all that risky, and partly because it is, after all, easier to get forgiveness than to get permission. Teachers who regularly take risks usually succeed, and the more they succeed the more they are permitted-even expected-to take risks the next time. Taking risks gives teachers a high tha!
t is healthy for them and their students. It makes good teaching, good learning.
4. Good Teachers Never Have Enough Time
Just about all of the good teachers I have known are eternally busy. They work 80-100 hour weeks, including both Saturdays and Sundays. Their spouses and families complain, with good reason, that they rarely see them. The reward for all this busy-ness is more busy-ness. The good teachers draw the most students, get the most requests for letters of recommendation, work most diligently at grading papers, give the most office hours and are most frequently visited during those office hours, are most in demand for committee work, work hardest at class preparations, work hardest at learning their students' names, take the time to give students counsel in areas that have nothing to do with specific courses, are most involved in professional activities off campus.
For good teachers the day is never done. While it does not follow that any teacher who keeps busy is a good teacher, the good teachers I know rarely have time to relax. The good teachers I know find that they are as busy teaching two courses as teaching three. They know that they do a much better job with the two courses than the three because they give more time to the individual students, but they also know that for a responsible teacher the work of good teaching expands to fill every moment they can give to it. They might well complain about how busy they are, but they rarely complain, partly because they don't want to take the time to, partly because they don't like whining. Actually, they seem rather to like being busy. To put it more accurately, they like helping students-singular and plural-and have not found many workable shortcuts to doing so.
7. Good Teachers Try to Keep Students-And Themselves-Off Balance
I have learned that when I am comfortable, complacent, and sure of myself I am not learning anything. The only time I learn something is when my comfort, my complacence, and my self-assurance are threatened. Part of my own strategy for getting through life, then, has been to keep myself, as much as possible, off balance. I loved being a student, but being a student meant walking into jungles where I was not sure my compass worked and didn't know where the trails might lead or where the tigers lurked. I grew to like that temporary danger. I try to inject some danger into my own courses, if only to keep myself off balance. When I feel comfortable with a course and can predict how it will come out, I get bored; and when I get bored, I am boring. I try, then, to do all I can to keep myself learning more. I do that in part by putting myself in threatening situations.
A couple of decades ago, I developed a new teaching area-an area I had never had a course in when I was a student: Native American literature. It would have been more comfortable for me to continue with the old stuff I knew, but part of what I knew is that I detest stagnation. I rashly offered the department's curriculum committee a new course. When they rashly accepted it, I was off balance, challenged by a new task in a new area. I now teach and publish in Native American literature regularly.
In 1988 I began to feel that I was growing complacent teaching the privileged students I have always taught at Lehigh University-mostly the children of upper middle class white families. It was getting too comfortable, too predictable. I applied for a Fulbright grant to teach for a year in the People's Republic of China. When the appointment came through, I was scared, but I signed the papers and not long after went with my wife and four teenaged children to Chengdu in Sichuan Province to take up the teaching of writing and American literature to Chinese graduate students. I have never felt so unbalanced in my life-teaching students who could just barely understand me, even when I was not talking "too fast." It was a challenge to teach such students to read the literature of a nation most of them had been taught to hate and to write papers in a language that was alien to them. And that was only part of the unbalance. The rest was riding my bicycle through streets the !
names of which I could not read, eating with chopsticks food that was almost always unrecognizable and often untranslatable because nothing quite like it grew in my native land. Never have I felt so unbalanced for so long a time, but never have I learned so much in so short a time.
I have noticed that good teachers try to keep their students off balance, forcing them to step into challenges that they are not at all sure they can handle. Good teachers push and challenge their students, jerking them into places where they feel uncomfortable, where they don't know enough, where they cannot slide by on past knowledge or techniques. Good teachers, as soon as their students have mastered something, push their best students well past the edge of their comfort zone, striving to make them uncomfortable, to challenge their confidence so they can earn a new confidence.
9. Good Teachers Do Not Trust Student Evaluations
Neither do bad teachers. But there is a difference in their reasons for distrusting them. I have noticed that good teachers, when they get really good evaluations, don't quite believe them. They focus instead on the one or two erratic evaluations that say something bad about them. They good teachers tend to trust only the negative evaluations: "I wonder what I did wrong. I suppose I went too fast, or perhaps I should have scheduled in another required conference after that second test. I wish I could apologize to them, or at least find out more about what I did wrong." The not-so-good teachers also do not trust student evaluations, but they distrust them for difference reasons. They tend to trust the positive evaluations but not the negative ones: "Those good evaluations are proof that I succeeded, that my methods and pace were just about right for these students. The others just fell behind because they were lazy, because they never bothered to read the book or stu!
dy for the exams. Naturally they did not like my course because they put nothing into it. Besides, how can students judge good teaching, and anyhow, what do they know? Anyone can get good student evaluations by lowering their standards, being popular, and by pandering to the masses." Good teachers tend to discount the positive evaluations, however numerous they may be; less-good teachers tend to discount the negative evaluations, however numerous they may be.
What’s the toughest part of your work as an educator? You are used to teaching lessons… you already have the knowledge, so it’s not that difficult to express it. However, the task of motivating your students to write falls in another category. It’s hard for you to take control over the process and explain how they should infuse their creativity into the rigid form of academic writing. The following online resources will help you teach essay writing in a more inspiring way.
Essay Writing Lesson Plans
1. Schools rarely provide teachers with clear lesson plans on essay writing. You have full authority over this aspect of education, so you need to set clear goals that your students will achieve step by step. Scholastic offers lesson plans for all grades. You will discover resources that will help you cover the basics of academic writing, but you can continue using the same website when your students make progress.
2. This is an amazing app that has the elements of writing arranged around four interface wheels: Content, Style, Organization, and Mechanics. You can click on any term around the wheels to reveal a new page containing the definition of that term, instructions for proper use, and examples from the literary canon.
3. You want your students to become great essay writers? Be a good example for them! Show unique samples on the topics you assign and tell your students how each part of the process is developed. You don’t have time to write papers? You can get them at this website! Custom writing service NinjaEssays assigns professional writers to the orders. They will complete a plagiarism-free paper tailored according to your instructions. Since you can monitor the project’s development, you’ll be able to explain to your students how the final result was achieved.
The blog at this website is another useful resource; you can recommend your students to enter contests and read tips that will boost their writing practices.
How to Teach Your Students to Write an Essay
4. Busy Teacher features a detailed guide that teaches educators how to teach essay writing. First, you need to understand the writing process before you can guide your students through it. Some teachers just assign a topic and expect everyone to deliver a perfect paper. Don’t do that! Academic writing is a complex skill that can only be developed under proper guidance. Rely on these tips to learn how to be there for your students through every stage of the process.
Essay Map
5. This interactive essay map, developed by ReadWriteThink, adds fun to the process of planning. Before they can start writing the actual essay, your students need to plan and organize its structure. They should develop a thesis and think of main arguments that will be supported with facts. This interactive essay mapping software asks students to write brief descriptions of the introduction, main ideas, supporting details, and conclusion. As a result, they will get a clear graphic outline that will make them more focused during the writing stages.
7. Time4Writing offers free writing resources in the form of printables, presentations, videos, and games. If you enable your students to obtain writing skills through fun and play, these projects won’t be overwhelming for them. The free resources are separated into categories according to the stages of the writing process.
8. It’s important to support your students with practical tips on essay writing. This guide recommends reading other people's essays, building vocabulary, develop precise arguments, etc. Each hint comes with a thorough explanation that will enable you to make the academic writing process easier for your students. As a result, they will understand the assignments not as a punishment, but as a chance to prove their skills and showcase their arguments.
And here is are two posts on how to write the classic 5 paragraph essay:
Education Reflective Essay Ideas
My Favorite Holiday Experience Essay
Tokyo Ville Monde Dissertation
Bivariate Data Analysis Common Core Algebra 1 Homework Practice
Chemical Storylines Assignment Answers Atmosphere Albums
Comparison Contrast Essay Transition Words
Essay Topics True Love
Essay On The Topic Aids
Animal For A Day Essay