Philosophies in progress: Teaching

Teaching, the reason I am supposed to be on this planet. If it wasn’t I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t be who I am, and I would have different values. My experience as a learner has taught me that teaching can take place anywhere and at anytime. I have developed a professional mentality when considering my teaching ability, I am new, but I am ready with the tools necessary to educate others. Understanding the different students, different curriculums, and different styles of teaching are essential when trying to relay information from me to my learner. I believe that there is no one right way to teach, due to the fact that there is no right way to learn, we all learn at different rates and in different ways. So we have to teach in different ways to adapt to certain learning habits. Teaching styles such as; command, practice, and reciprocal are a few where the teacher makes a majority of the decisions, where as guided discovery, divergent, and inclusion allow the learner to make more decisions. With a class who moves fast and gets bored easily we can use one of the student-centered approach where they can choose the pace at which they move without even realizing. Now there is a time and place for each style and it is the responsibility of the teacher to be able to distinguish when it is appropriate to use set style.
Being able to observe correctly will enhance any teacher’s ability to understand their students. For this is seeing with understanding. Being able to take that understanding and reciprocate it to the learner to better their skill is a firm action I regularly take place in. It’s not practice that makes perfect, its perfect practice that makes perfect. Now obviously it is very hard to reach for perfection but it is vital that we have it in the sight for all students without it there is no point of getting better. Assessments are a vital tool to use when observing students productivity, it will show competence or lack they’re of, in the psychomotor, affective, and cognitive domains. Upon assessing will allow us to determine if students are ready to move on or if more refined practice must be done.
I understand that the most effective teachers are the ones who teach with passion and purpose, if you are not one of these people than you need to find a new career because I will not sit by and watch unmotivated educators ruin the minds of young learners who have just as much right to a great education as the next.

Philosophies in progress: Coaching

Coaching, is it really just another form of teaching? You have a group of youths gathered for a similar purpose, with the desire to learn and enhance their skills. As a coach you have the same responsibilities as a teacher, to educate anyone who is willing to learn. By becoming a physical education teacher I dedicate my time to enhancing the knowledge of any athlete in any sport to the best of my ability who has the desire to learn and make himself or herself better. As a coach you have the responsibility to instill more than just sports skills into your team; cooperation, respect, and responsibility are major components when discussing the positive outcomes of athletics. Allowing students to participate in cooperative sports puts the athlete in a social environment where they will learn to cope with decisions that may not be made by or directly benefiting them. This also allows them to be placed in confrontational situations where they will have to decided how to act. If the program is successful student-athletes will be able to understand that words can solve more problems than violence. Slowly but effectively students will start to gain independence and self-responsibility allowing them to accept consequences when they are deserved. All aspects attribute to outside personal skills as well as on the field skills. Athletics is a major outlet for most students, allowing self-expression by choosing the desired sport they engage in. This decision can be brought back to the experiences athletes gain through the influences by the coaches. Coaches hold a much hire pull in game play than parents or spectators, so it really is the relationship between the athlete and coach that must be strong. The only way a relationship can grow is through experiences both positive and negative, if we do not have the negative how will we ever learn from our mistakes. Learning how to cope with the stressful situations is a great asset that all athletes gain through dedicated hard work. Such as juggling being a Student-Athlete, the reason we say student first is because the academic of our athletes is first and foremost more important than winning a soccer game. By high school we have tri-student-athletes meaning they will engage in a varsity sport every season having them being constantly busy all year round. Some student-athletes are unable to handle the pressures of both but the few that can gain the value of hard work and prioritize ones work load.

Philosophies in progress: Education

Education, the foundation of our society, without the value of knowledge we are no better than running around like a chicken with our heads cut off. We as a society have put our education above all things where it should be. Children are mandated to start school at the ages of 5-6 where they start kindergarten learning the basics of shapes, numbers, and colors. This may seem tedious but to new student’s education is food and these kids are starving. Every student starts off with the desire to learn and yet as the years go on students lose interest and lack the initiative to do better. Why would anyone want to enter a profession that lacks so much motivation? Some could say it’s the reward of seeing a kid succeed, some say it’s because they struggled as a kid and didn’t have anyone there for them, but me I am entering this profession because I can relate to the kids directly, on a level where I understand what is interesting to them and what is boring. Given this gift I can create lessons that will engage students as well as cause them to think outside the classroom, granted my classroom will be a gymnasium but that doesn’t mean that education inside my classroom is just in the physical. Yes, I teach through the physical but I teach more life lessons than any math or science teacher ever can. As I said we start our students off young, by initiating moral conversations students will be more inept to follow the rules and be a “good student” this doesn’t mean you won’t have the kids who get off task it just means you have to  create a lesson that is interesting enough to block out all other distractions. Now I would like to say that the classroom is my greatest challenge but it’s not, my responsibilities as an educator extend much further than the classroom. Being an educator means having to fight for the right of your subject, Physical Education being one of the most misunderstood topics gets very little support from its communities. Now obviously I personally think that education is the most important, and that is a good thing because this means I will fight for my students rights in physical education, it is mandated that students get  120 minutes a week of physical education, most students would be lucky if they got 100 minutes a week. Now you may be saying well they get the extra time during recess but really if one was to watch a group of students during recess more than half of the students will not be physically active. So now you see why we cannot substitute valuable class time with do whatever you want time, because essentially that’s exactly what recess is. As I said before life lessons are learned in my classroom, for example students will learn and value friendship and teamwork, this is brought about by incorporating cooperative games into units, these forces students to relay and trust others in order to complete and reach a common goal successfully. It also is a great way to help students define themselves, if they can find a physical activity that they like and are good at they now have an activity that they can do for the rest of their lives, and as a physical educator my main purpose is to educate my students physically but also give them the tools they will need for life-long physical fitness.