User:Cgirv001
From WITTIE
My name is Christi Girvin. I am 31 years old and a mother of three. I am a lifelong resident of York County. Some people might think living in the same place for your whole life would be boring but I find comfort in the familiarity of it, it is kind of neat that my children go to the same school I went to. My oldest daughter has just started her first year of middle school, my son is in 4th and my youngest daughter is in 1st grade.
I enjoy doing things with my children and working with children in general. It is one of the reasons I want to be a teacher. Another reason is the joy I get when I explain something or help solve a problem and there is this look of awe and pride a child gets, it is the coolest thing. I also hear my nephews and children complain about teachers and say things like, I hate English, my teacher is so mean or History stinks, the teacher is so boring. It is a shame that the whole subject is blamed for a teacher’s lack of patience or creativity. I would like to be a fun and effective middle school English or Algebra teacher.
My goal as a teacher is to impart information to my students in fun and enjoyable way. I want them to love English or say History is their favorite class, because really a child's feelings about a class are based largely on the teacher. As a teacher I plan to present facts in a way that gets students involved in their education by creating activities that will engage them and make the subject fun. I think that making up a lesson plan and using that same lesson plan year after year makes the subject boring for me as a teacher and if I can't get excited about materials why should the students. Information needs to be fresh and fun, so it doesn't get old.
Another thing I plan to do in my classroom is to incorporate technology into my teaching. The way children are with computers, internet and how they access information, it would be ridiculous to expect them to be interested solely in an education tool, like a typical textbook that is to them outdated. I think it would be fun and beneficial to have students do activities like having groups of students take different parts of selected Shakespeare play and rewrite and record it in the present day, they will have to translate and comprehend the works in order to recreate them. In a History class students could be a member of the departing English crew heading for Jamestown, learning the difficulties and problems the settlers had will enable them to create a supply list and plan to help them avoid those issues, there could even be the devil's advocate group that would have the task of trying to foresee what the settlers preparations would be and come up with problems to throw at them to determine how they would handle situations. Both groups could do online research to determine how long the trip would take, what kind of items they would need to bring and even Google the area to see what conditions and environment they will be arriving in. During their overview they could explain how the internet was beneficial and what difference the tool could have made to the original settlers had they had access to it. These lessons are different but the students would still gain the information required and at the same time it wouldn't feel like the same lesson over and over. I think that having classroom cooperation will lead to parent involvement, which is also very important for a good learning environment.
