Teacher

What is your topic, and how are you going to approach it? What are you thinking of including?

My topic is "teacher". I have no idea how I will approach it. There is so much to be said about what a teacher is, and I've already learned so much about the concept of teacher in the past month that it's hard to narrow the concept down to a short presentation. I think I will, as usual, include personal examples from my own experience as a teacher. I will broaden my horizons to appeal to others' perceptions of teacher, but for the most part I will stay true to my own philosophy of what makes a teacher a teacher. Here's a little bit of my personal background which will shape what I'm going to take into this presentaton:

I taught high school English for the past 6 years, and I've always been proud of that. I thought I was a pretty good teacher: most of the students passed the class and standardized tests, they seemed to enjoy my class, and I even had kids come back to tell me that I was the best teacher they ever had or to tell me the most important things they had learned were from me. That made me feel good. I was an "old-school" type of teacher, too. I'm the formalist, directive type who would have done well in a one-room schoolhouse of K-12 with just chalk and slate. I'm a believer of reading a lot to learn how to write well. I think good grammar and punctuation is just as important as style and voice and audience. I'm the type of person who gets "turned off" to continuing reading something if I find errors. I believe in "knowing everything" to build a solid foundation of education. The philosophy I always taught my students was, "You are not allowed to have an opinion without an education to back it up", and I saw it as my place to educate them about as much as I could in the 9 months I had them so they could form their own philosphies and opinions of life and the world based on educated backgrounds. So, after learning all these different theories and philosophies, and after reading about the concept of "teacher" in Keywords and thinking back on the teachers that taught me the most, I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to stick with my own idea of "teacher".