My MEL Experiences

Student/Teacher Relationships: I have always felt that this was a very important part of learning, as I have always noticed that teachers who are more comfortable with the class tend to have more luck reaching more students. I consider myself lucky because I have only had a few teachers that were terrible establishing strong relationships with their students, but out of all of the good ones I have to say that my creative writing teacher was the best. I had Miss. Eshelmen in my senior year and she was able to create a very safe environment for our weekly writing critiques by submitting her own work to be criticized with the work of all the students. Her reasoning for this was if she expected us to put our writing, pride, and feelings on the line it was only fair that she did the same. Her doing this really helped me out when it came to the memoir unit because it was nice to know that our teacher was putting her personal experiences out their to be judged just like I was doing with a memoir about my great grand father's funeral.
Autonomy: This is another teaching strategy that depending on the subject really helps me to learn and to get higher grades. I can remember having to jump through all sorts of hoops while writing my first research paper. I had to turn in so many note cards by such and such a date, and I had to submit an outline, then a rough draft, and ultimately hand in a final copy. I knew at the time that the rigid scheduling was only in place to help the students to know that we were still doing all the work correctly, but I couldn't think of anything but the multiple deadlines, and ultimately did not do as well on the final draft as I would have hoped. Although when it came time to do another research paper with another teacher, and he told us to have the entire paper done by a certain date I was able to pace myself and I ended up getting an A+ on that paper. It was the autonomy that helped me to know when I would do my best work on the paper and that is when I would work on it.
Context: Is something that I found out I needed while I was taking a physics course my senior year. In this physics course we would use many of the same equations that I had struggled through and ultimately failed to grasp completely in a pre-calculus course that I had taken the semester before, but the difference with this course was the fact that my teacher, Mr. Lybarger, was able to provide a context for those equations that I had never fully learned to use before. It was the context on how these equations would work in the real world that made them finally click. It made sense to me that a certain equation be applied to a car speeding around an icy corner because I was able to visualize an actual object for the coefficients to all the variables. It also helped me because I would be able to check my answers to a realm of possibility. I knew that it was impossible to throw a baseball at seven hundred miles per hour so I would go back and rework the equations until I came up with a plausible solution.
Helping Students: This is something that all teachers should be willing to do, but some that I have had, would outright refuse. Interestingly enough it as always been in my worst subjects that I have had teachers that would refuse to give students help. In middle school I had an algebra teacher that called home and forced me to drop the class because I had a B- in his class. I wanted to remain in the class and I asked him for help, but he refused to help me after class and ultimately called me up to the blackboard to do out a problem. After making me rewrite the problem four or five times because my handwriting was so poor, he informed me that the problem was wrong and told me to go sit down and called on his son a, "competent student" to do the problem "legibly and correctly." It turns out that I had only forgotten a negative sign out of nervousness. I switched into a different class a few days later. If I had been able just to talk one on one about what I was doing wrong I know that I would have been able to fix the problem. I know this because I did just that with the same subject and a different teacher.
Connections: It is the ability to connect history to all other disciplines that drives my passion for it. Everything has a history, and I have had quite a few teachers that knew this and used it to engage their students. I have had countless numbers of history teachers that would start a class off with a list of "this day in history" type trivia questions, and they were able to touch on the history of all sorts of different subjects while giving out candy or even extra credit points. By doing this all students were able to see how to connect history to their interests and hobbies. Also whenever possible they would do small tangent lessons that would cover the history of sports, medicine, music, etc. of a time period or civilization that was being covered in class.