Teacher Interview

Summary:

So I decided to have a sit down with a childhood friend that is a high school P.E. and health teacher. The reason I decided to interview my friend is that I knew he would give me great insight on what to expect as a future P.E. teacher and also it would be pretty easy to talk to him about this. I wanted it to be somewhat of a formal/ informal type of conversation as if we were just hanging out, enjoying a few, and exchanging questions and ideas.

Reflection:

While talking with my friend and giving him different questions to answer, I wasn't that bit of surprised by his responses. I feel as though we have seen similar situations (minus the whole a student leaving the middle of class to want to find him and get confrontational) I haven't had that yet and hopefully I never will. Listening to him explain how he has handled students that have been confrontational or might be disruptive was very interesting to me. Because let's be honest, none of us ever want to have a confrontation with another student despite if we are having a bad day or just not in a good mood. I know as a Teacher's Assistant, I'm not ever looking for a fight with a student but I always want to feel prepared on how to handle any situation in school.

I wasn't surprised by him always going back to classroom management skills and why come there so necessary. I know I said it in a recent blog of mine but I keep hearing how important classroom management is from a lot of different teachers. I liked hearing him say that on the first day of school the expectations, rules, and consequences are clearly stated to both the students and the parents so there is no confusion. I feel like that is something I have always tried to establish with sports teams that I have coached and will carry over into the educational field one day.

I learned from my interview that a rewards system works depending on what grade level you are teaching. I would like to believe that most everyone would agree that what you use for elementary school students for a rewards system would be very different when working with high schoolers. I don't disown reward systems because I do think they work depending on the students in your class and if they want to take to it and participate.

I found it very insightful when I asked him how does he move on from a rough day at school and the professionalism that he expressed while also being real about the situation. We are all going to have our rough days in the field and it's how we respond that is going to help us grow as educators. The important thing for me when I'm having a rough day is to try my best not to let it show or express it (hopefully I work on my poker face between now and then). But just like in the angry teacher video we had to watch I feel like the teacher was letting his rough day show and he was expressing it and taking it out on the kids. The old phrase "Kids will be kids" and that is something also my interviewee mentioned in our video. But as adults we have to learn how to overcome that rough day and still push through and come back the next day even better. As Rafiki said, "It doesn't matter, it's in the past."

In closing, I asked my friend what advice he would have for me while getting ready to enter the educational field and he responded with you have to make it fun for you and the kids. You have to realize that everyone is different and you have to get to know your students and what their interests are and how can you incorporate that into your lessons to help them with physical fitness. I thought this was a very good point because if I am teaching a lesson on something that doesn't interest me, there's not going to be any energy or enthusiasm. The lesson will be dead then because you can't rely on students to bring energy to the unit. I try to do this every day during my practice where I am the loudest one in the gym with the most energy because I am excited to be there. Positivity and energy are contagious in a room or gym setting.