July 2018
During this past spring semester, I was working as a long-term substitute teacher at James Campbell High School. I had a full line of 9th grade physical science students. What I learned from that experience is that your mastery of the subject only accounts for a portion of your effectiveness. The effectiveness of your classroom management can be the determining factor of whether your students learn or don’t learn. And that is what I struggled the most with during my time at JCHS. Through all my previous classes, they talk about some strategies to manage your students, but it is different once you’re actually out there.
I believe that the main goal of a science teacher is to make students question the world around them and the world in themselves. My classes were much more fun for both me and my student when the students were asking about related topics or how we can apply the lesson to other concepts. Once you start asking questions, there is no limit to your knowledge. I hope to train my students so that they keep making connections and is alway in wonderment. After this past semester, I have concluded that students do not like science classes because they are too accustomed to just being fed information. Science is the application of knowledge to the real world, and some students that I have talked to have trouble applying these concepts. That being said, I believe that the more interactive and hands-on learning students can participate in, the more they will learn because it becomes easier to see the applications; this is true not only for science, but for all subjects.
~ Aladdin Roque-Dangaran