Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Week 4 - Professionalism in teaching
Now that you have read chapter 2 about the professionalization of teaching and we discussed a few of the issues in class, I would like for you to reflect upon your 13+ years of schooling and the examples your teachers have set for you. You need to think of a time, experience, or memory of a teacher doing or saying something that exemplified that he/she was truly a well-respected professional. OR you can write about a time, experience, or memory of a teacher doing or saying something that was not professional. Do not use names when you are talking about this teacher. It can be a simple issue like "One of my high school teachers always wore shorts to school." Or it can be a complex issue such as "One of the high school teachers used to go to student parties on the weekend and drink alcohol in front of the students." After you state the issue, type a few sentences about why you thought it was professional or unprofessional and how it affected your learning. Please be sensitive to the fact that this topic is very subjective. Something you might think is unprofessional another person might think is not a big deal. Let's be aware of people's differing opinions. We need to make sure we keep this post PROFESSIONAL:-)
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One of my high school teachers always conducted himself in a professional manner. I remember that whenever he had a student-teacher conference in his classroom, he would leave the door open. This act may not strike you as significant or professional, but the reason behind it will. He left his door open because he valued his career and never wanted anyone to second guess his intentions with a student. The open door allowed anyone to see what was going on in the classroom. This teacher knew that in today's world there are teachers who have ill-intentions towards students, and there are also good teachers whose actions or words may be misunderstood. He never wanted to be accused of wrong-doing because of a midunderstanding.
ReplyDeleteThis action affected my learning because I saw how much he cared and valued not only his job, but the students he taught. I knew that he cared about my well-being and success. Therefore, I wanted to do my best and work hard for him.
I myself cannot remember a certain instance that my teachers of the past have shown professionalism, and in the same respect, I cannot remember an instance that a teacher has shown unprofessionalism. I have however heard from some of my other friends instances where there teachers have been grossly inappropriate. For example, a close friend of mine went to a separate high school. while taking a history class, she told me that she and her friends would go to parties on the weekends and their history teacher would be there, as well as purchase alcohol for them, and other illegal substances.
ReplyDeleteThis is an example of inappropriate because obviously it is grossly inappropriate for any adult to purchase anything of that nature to anyone underage. Also, because of the teacher's position, he shouldn't be around his students in any way that isn't school related. Being around students like that opens the teacher up to legal problems and personal problems. The teacher in the end was fired, and he lost his teaching liscense. taking risks like that just aren't worth it in the long run.
I wonder why that history teacher thought it was ok to party with students and break the law. I wonder if some teachers feel like they are in high school again, and they want to feel accepted by "the cool kids." Teachers are supposed to instruct effectively and take care of students even if it means being "unpopular." The teacher mentioned above obviously made a serious misjudgement which resulted in the striping of his license.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I remember from high school was one of my Math teachers going to a party with some baseball players and turning them in to the A.D. In return she got herself fired for being at the party and lying to the school board.
ReplyDeleteI think this was very unprofessional because not only did she party with minors, she also turned them in after supplying them with alchohol.
I remember about a year or so ago my teacher had said to me, "I have an IQ of 150 don't you think I just might know a little bit more than you do?" and I said, "You're 50 years old, I'd expect you to know more than me." Fortunately, I shook it off. But what if I was trult insecure? I feel that a teacher should never use his or her pride about anything, big or small, in the attempt to make his or herself look or feel better than a student. I think teachers should always keep in mind that we are not only educators, but role models. We are there to assist in the learning process, not to shoot it down.
ReplyDeletenot to mention on another occasion, she also asked a group of students between the ages of 5-18 if they were geniuses and proceeded in telling all of us how she was. I raised my hand when she asked. To me, personally, there's only 18 kids in the whole school, so if I'm not a genius whose fault is that? lol aaanyway.....
ReplyDeleteLiz,
ReplyDeleteOpen - door policy! Excellent minor but very important example of professional behavior.
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ReplyDeleteI had a teacher that was very unprofessional. She would cuss out students and flirt with the guys in class. She would get mad if the guys flirted with say me. They were actually my age though which i didn't understand that. There were alot of rumors about her sleeping with the male students. I believe them by the way they acted towards each other. You could tell they were more than just teacher and student. If you ask me it was very unprofessional. When a teacher gets jealous when the guys flirt with the girls in class is very funny.
ReplyDeleteWhen i was in high school i had a coach that was for cross country and he also did boys swimming and taught chemistry. He was a great coach and held himself to the most professional level there was. He always was there for his students and athletes. He never favored or held his athletes at a different standard than the rest of his students. I remember a time when he had to hold one of our star athletes out of a race because he wasn't making the grade in class. We were all shocked, but yet impressed. He always excepted the same if now better out of us.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time he lived near a bunch of us. Not one time did he put him self in a bad situation or a position where he could get in trouble. He always maintained a watchful eye but never said a thing to us.
I look back now and see how he handled himself as a teacher and coach and understand why it was so important. In these days teacher are excepted to keep a professional view. With the few teachers that have not done that it had created a bad view on teaching. To look back at the rest of my teachers i see that i never once had a teacher that was unprofessional. Teaching maybe considered an easy field by many but teaching is held at the highest standard there is. So when one decides to become a teacher they tell everyone i hold myself to a professional standard at all times.
Hannah-
ReplyDeleteI do agree that the teacher and student had something. But did anyone ever think to say something to another teacher? I would think that is something that would be a serious distraction in the classroom.
hannah,
ReplyDeleteCome to think of it, I had a teacher who was kind of in the same situation. It seemed as though she favored cheerleaders as well as males who were a part of the more popular crowd. I know it seems as if everyone has heard this type of story before, but she was my favorite teacher, and it kind of seemed as if she had a problem with me coming to her for help, or to talk as I had seen her with other students.
But back to your story hannah,
I agree from what I hear, there is no way that that relationship was purely teacher and student, and if it was that obvious to you then there is no way that it wasn't obvious to your other classmates who weren't involved. I'm surprised no one said anything and brought it up to the teacher or the administration of the school, because that is very unprofessional, as well as that type of relationship can out the student at risk socially and mentally
I recall the majority of my teachers being very professional. Most of the instructors at my school were men and all of them would wear a shirt and tie to cass everyday. They usually gave equal opportunities to all students, favorites were rarely played. When i noticed this, it forced me not to slack off for who i was or for my role in the school. Every student was treated equal, and that is what i found very professional.
ReplyDeleteAnthony's mom - Can you give us your name so we know who to whom we are responding?
ReplyDeleteYou are so lucky to have had the professional coach and teacher. Sounds like he was a good role model on and off the field and inside and outside of the classroom. I wish all teachers recognized the importance of their actions!
I recall only one time or two when a teacher was being unprofessional. In my middle school, when i was in 6th grade, the art teacher Mr. Long got caught with porn on his computer and a student saw it and told another teacher. Mr Long got fired from Jefferson and we never saw him again.
ReplyDeleteAshly hop i agree with you comment saying a teacher should never make astudent feel small. Teachers a supossed to tell you you are smart and can do anything you put you mind to.
ReplyDeletethroughout all of my years in school I have only had one really unprofessional time. this was when my 7th grade art teacher also Mr. Long (weird) kicked a student in my class. he was then fired. other then that all of my teahcers have been professional.
ReplyDeletein all my years of being a student i can only recall one time a teacher showed signs of unprofessionalism. i was in 8th grade and my science class were getting very rowdy and loud and eventually the teacher(male) couldnt take it anymore so he just walked out of the class. we didnt see him ever again because i guess he quit from that point on. we had a sub the rest of the year. he wasnt the best teacher anyways so he helped us all out by stepping down.
ReplyDeleteMy experience was a small issue that bothered me personally. It's not really a big deal,except with manners. One of my teachers would come into the classroom everyday with a glass of ice water. She wouldn't drink the water; she would just chomp on the ice. chomp chomp chomp...*cringe* It probablty shoudn't bother me so much,but I personally can't stand to be around someone who chews their food so loudly. I couldn't concentrate on my tests and assignments.
ReplyDeleteMy experience involves my 6th grade teacher. Since day one, this teacher emphazied that he truly cared about all of us. Each week he would have private meetings with us so that he could somehow help improve our weak points and make us better students and people in general.
ReplyDeleteWhat this taught me was that he was doing more than just teaching us about academics. He was teaching us about life. I believe that is a very important aspect as a teacher and that is what I will strive to be like when I become a teacher.
Liz,
ReplyDeleteI agree with Mrs. Bishop with the open door policy. That is very professional and respectful of him.
Well i remember when i was a sophmore in high school my english 2 teacher was a very raciest person, and desided she would make a comement to a mixed race child, she ended up callin him a "burnt cracker" needless to say she didnt last long after that....that was my "not very professional" memory
ReplyDeleteto mica tharp- i actually had a teacher that did the exact same thing only she chewed with her mouth open so every once in a while a big ice chunch would fly out onto someones paper. so after a while it was pretty much a good idea to just not sit infront of her.
ReplyDeleteHi Everyone,
ReplyDeleteI'm sure there's been plenty of moments of teachers being both professional and unprofessional but there's one that's always stayed in my mind for almost 2 decades now. Back in elementary school one of the 5th grade teachers, who was subbing for a 4th grade student, said to a student
"You know Santa Claus isn't real don't you?"
I was horrified. I had only found out about Santa/EasterBunny/ToothFairy about 6 months prior and I remember being rather upset about the whole thing because my parents had lied to me. Maybe I was kinda late developing in that regard, but I can only imagine how horrible it would have been if I had found out from the teacher and not on my own with confirmation from my parents. Even worse was the fact that the teacher who said this did so during lunch, when kids of all grade could hear her.
Julia,
ReplyDeleteI had a similar type of teacher. This teacher ran one ran the debate team and, in the classroom, was very professional. However, during school club hours she would totally ignore any male club members and talk only to the girls. She would help only the girls, unless you (a male) approached her yourself and then she would help you, but not as much as she'd help the girls.
I enjoyed the club as we went to other schools for events and I made a lot of friends I wouldn't have met otherwise, but if I hadn't had so much fun at the events I would have quit because other the attitude of the teacher. I know for certain that other males did both notice her attitude and quit because of it. Sad thing is, I'm not sure how much of her attitude was intentional.
As teachers we will have to constantly analyze our behavior and be sure that we are fair to all our students, even if we do like some more than others.
My sophmore year of high school, i had a football coach for a teacher. Most football teachers at our school are well..perverts. And on my first day of school i wore this cute green shirt. When i got to the classroom he was standing outside the door. As i walked in, he straightened up, looked down at me to say hi. I first thought he was just weird. Then i noticed he would do this anytime my shirt was low. Soon i put two and two together and realized he was looking down my shirt. It was something to today scares me when someone is looking at me. In my opinion this teacher was very unprofessional.
ReplyDeleteThe first thing I thought of when I read this was my high school Spanish teacher. She was really nice and was a wonderful teacher. However, she was young and very pretty, and she was very aware of this. The attire she chose for wearing to the classroom just astonished me. She tended to wear black shirts, but all of them came well above her knee and she usually wore heels that I would see on a trashy girl in a bar. One particular day I will never forget. She had blacks pants and heels on, but was sporting a collared shirt that was connected in the front by a few strings. It was completely open in the front; I could see her belly button! It was horrible, and very distracting and unprofessional!
ReplyDeleteBrian,
ReplyDeleteWhat school did you go to??? I remember the exact same thing happening in my elementary school. The only difference is that I was one of the kids that overheard the horror at lunch. That's how I found out; the child was upset and crying about it at lunch! My parents and I had a very serious talk that night!!!
in middle school i can remember two VERY unprofessional people. one was my 7th grade asst principal who favored only the "popular" kids and allowed them to get away with as much as she could without being stopped by her superiors. especially the boys! they always got out of trouble! however if anyone else were to do the slightest thing wrong, they were automatically in the spotlight. another was my 8th grade history teacher. he was, for lack of better words, a total pervert. we never had seating assignments like most other classes, he would just tell people where to sit. and it just so happens that girls in skirts or tank tops or anything the least bit revealing were in the front row at all times. it took us girls awhile to realize what was going on, we were in 8th grade- never expecting a teacher to be like that. funny thing a few years ago, i remember hearing that the principal was arrested for prostitution and the history teacher was let go for harrassment not long ago as well. im not one hundred percent sure that those things are true, but i hope so. i would never want to send my daughter to someones care that was as unprofessional as either one of them.
ReplyDeleteashley hop-
ReplyDeletei could not agree more. teachers are there to inspire, not to brag about how smart they are. the idea behind a teacher is to teach students what they dont know. obviously she had some insecurities or something!
just wanted to see if my picture was up!
ReplyDeleteIt was my freshman year of high school and we had this very attractive student teacher. She always had on clothing that showed cleavage and of course all the guys loved her. People would stop at the door just to look at her while she was teaching a class. That was very distracting also. I believe this was unprofessional because there were distractions from learning. If it wasn’t a person in class saying something about her it was someone out in a hall coming in and saying something. What made it worse was that she always would flirt back as well. It was very hard to talk to her about school work because there would be many boys in the classroom after the day was over flirting back with her. The teacher is not there to flirt with student.
ReplyDeleteJordan Schott, I once had a teacher do the same exact thing! It was a different situation. People would always make fun of her because she looked like an owl. People stood up in class, flapped their arms, and made owl sounds until the teacher cried and stormed out. As you said she wasn’t the greatest teach in the world but it still hurts not to be accepted by your students.
ReplyDeleteas mica was saying, it would be hard for me to succeed in a class that had a teacher smackin and chompin their teeth while they ate or drank. sometimes you wonder why some teachers just dont have the common courtesy to watch what they do around people. the students are people too, and sometimes teachers forget that.
ReplyDeleteone of my classes was a class with in a class and the iep students would leave to take the test. there was about eight students that would leave and when we would get to the class room we would work on the test together. together we were able to get all the right answers, but the sped teacher made us all miss a different answer so it did not look like we were cheating. needless to say she was fired.
ReplyDeleteI had a teacher in high school who was very professianl. He always ran his classoom with efficiacy and order but he still made the class fun by taking a difficult subject and making it learnable. I really enjoyed being in that class and i hope to someday be able to mimick his style.
ReplyDeleteI think that malach's teacher sounded amazing and that he learned alot from him or her
ReplyDeleteIn high school all of the football players would get away with a lot more then the other kids. this wasnt meant by the teachers but it was how it was. the other students just dealt with it.
ReplyDeleteMy geometry teacher dressed very unprofessionally. She wore converse and mini skirts. And she was over 45. Yeah... it was distracting and very unprofessional (to say the least).
ReplyDeleteJulia, I understand where you are coming from, talking about teachers favoring students! I noticed this first hand many times in High School. However, I would say topping the inappropriate list on sooo many levels; would be a teacher dating his or her student. The teacher would be jeopardizing their career, the school’s name, future development of the involved child, not to mention all the other legal issues that go along with it, the list could go on. This and many of the other issues mentioned not only affect the teacher but can further affect the community.
ReplyDeleteOne of my guy friends dated his high school teacher. Unfortunately nothing ever came of it and no one ever knew.
I had a teacher once that was very unprofessional. One day he was talking about being professionaly when you go to apply for a job and that everything you do is look at. He said that one must pay attention to what they put on their application becuase words spelled wrong or used in the wrong context could cost you your job. This all made sense and I understand that. The next topic he was using works like aint gonna do dat and things like that. He totally made himself look stupid. On top of that he was about saying F_@# in like every sentence.
ReplyDeleteThis past week in one of my classes, my sister was telling me that she had one of her college professors shush the class for about thirty seconds. She said it was very rude and they weren't even talking. Class hadn't started and everyone was just waiting. He was very obnoxious and unprofessional in her opinion.
ReplyDeleteAt dinner tonight, another friend of mine said that her LU band director yelled at the marcxhing band, singling ONE young man out and scolding him. He questioned him about whether he always played that badly, or if he was ever going to do anything right.
These incidents make it very hard for me to believe that these teachers ever made it to the university level.
One my first day of highschool I had this math teacher who introduced herself to the class. She came off as a really nice person, so then we all went around the class and introduced ourselves and had to tell one interesting thing about ourself. There was this one guy who seemed to be really demanding, he wanted to start the introduction and he started acting really rude to the the rest of us who was trying to talk. The teacher was getting really upset so she decided to tell him to shut up and she told him that he was annoying and she started blabbering on about how his mother didnt teach him any manner or home training. Little did the teacher know, the boy's mother died about a year before and he stormed out crying. I think thast was one of the rudest things ever and very unprofessional because there were other ways she could've handled that situation. No one really respected her after she made that comment so eventually she quit and I think she went to another school,but as children/students we were always taught growing up by teacher, to never tell another student to "shut up" or anything along those lines and I think she really crossed the line and wasn't setting a good example for her students.
ReplyDeleteMica,
ReplyDeleteI agree that singling out a student is very unprofessional. Teachers are suppose to help student, encourage them, and help build their self-esteem. I had a problem like that myself, and trust me it didnt end well. I ended up dropping out of that class because me and the teacher did not get along, i thought that she was always picking on me even if she wasnt i just always felt that way.
I've had quite a few unprofessional teachers in the past. For instance, in my 8th grade math class our teacher would rub students backs, and in one case she repeatedly chucked erasers and markers at a student. Another teacher had the policy 'if you're not here, you're talked about' and would talk smack on anyone who wasn't present, and sometimes she'd talk like that to their faces. She was a gossiper, that's for sure. In the first case, touching a student, even though she might have thought it innocent, was very uncomfortable for the girl (she was my friend), and then there is the fact that the teacher was throwing things at the student which could have seriously hurt him. The second teacher acted like she was a student more then a teacher. I loved her because she was cool and relaxed, but it's frusterating when someone you try to look up to is acting younger then you.
ReplyDeleteAlexis,
ReplyDeleteThat was way out of bounderies, but I can understand to a degree. Yes, they shouldn't have made an outburst like that and should have handled the situation better, but being the oldest of six kids I know how hard it is to not yell at them when they're pushing your buttons. Then again, they're my brothers and sisters, not my students.
Dana,
ReplyDeleteI went to Null Elementary and this would have been in 1993.