Essays

When I was in undergrad at University of Michigan, I taught swim lessons every summer. I remember one of the parents of one of my students asking if I was in school for education. I blanched. “Oh god, no,” I said to her. My mother was an elementary school teacher and I volunteered in her room sometimes. I saw the writing on the walls for public school teachers. I saw the district and the state removing more and more resources from my mom and her classroom every year. I was disinterested in pursuing a career where I wouldn’t be appreciated or supported. There is a proverb: “Man plans and God laughs.” I ended up becoming a tutor, a private educator. I had people ask me so many times over the year, “Why don’t you become a real teacher?” It felt like clients, family, and friends did not respect the service I provided or what I did for work. This common line of questioning made me undervalue myself in my chosen career.

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Probably the largest change I experienced throughout my master’s degree in education was developing a feeling of connectedness to the education community and seeing my role in it more with more legitimacy and clarity. In most of the courses I took in the master’s program, I had to email professors to request to modify assignments because the projects presumed us - the students in the program - to be classroom teachers. Toward the beginning of my master’s degree, I apologized, feeling like an imposter. “I’m sorry I’m not a real teacher and need assignment modifications,” those emails implied. My professors were overwhelmingly kind and validating, and by the halfway point of my degree program, I was no longer making apologies for myself. I asked professors what they thought would be an effective modification for a tutor and had fruitful discussions. Additionally, I started to see myself more connected with classroom education. For example, Teaching School Mathematics taught me the value of justifying answers, which had previously been something I thought was unnecessary and overly difficult for students. Once I understood that it was a practice that promotes equal outcomes among students, I dedicated myself to defending it and trying harder to get students to understand how to engage in meaningful justification. This improved my relationship to classroom teachers, even if those teachers were unaware of it.

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I have always felt like one of my main roles as a tutor was supporting teachers, due to the fact that I help their students complete assignments and understand content. For years before starting my master’s degree program, I would defend the need to learn high school math, explain why grammar was important, and advocate for education for all. It was this support role as a tutor that made me choose Developing Positive Attitudes in Learning for my issues course in my master’s program. Being someone who spends one-on-one time with learners, I have more of an opportunity to address student motivation than classroom teachers. Before this program and this class, I would use the classic question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” to help motivate. I used their answer to try to argue why they needed to have an education, or know what we were studying specifically for their future. The CEP 802 course showed me how much more complex motivation is for students. There is intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, which are the common aspects people tend to think of when we think of motivation. Intrinsic motivation describes the motivation that comes from within - the students who like to learn and like to be successful. Extrinsic motivation are things like rewards and grades that help students feel motivated to do work. There is a problem with only focusing on these two things: extrinsic motivation doesn’t necessarily motivate the student to learn. Students motivated only by grades will do the minimum they need to do to get the grade. In CEP 802 we learned about the TARGET acronym in motivational education and how to apply it. TARGET stands for Tasks, Authority, Recognition, Groups, Evaluation, and Time. Each part of the acronym helps foster engagement with student work and reduce students comparing themselves to one another. Helping students feel motivated is so much more than asking them what they want from life and trying to encourage that. I learned that there is value in making students feel good about what they are doing and to foster enjoyment of learning through praise. I learned that letting students take ownership of themselves and their time helps them feel more engaged with their work. This course did not change how I see my responsibility as a private educator: I have always thought it was part of my job to increase motivation. What this course did was teach me how to do that more effectively.

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When I was in elementary and middle school, I was always praised for my writing. I was creative and I had a voice. That same point of view that I was praised for when I was young was criticized when I was older because a professional voice was expected for academic works. I was marked down for my casual tone in essays. In undergrad, I took a course on essay writing that connected me with the concept of “creative nonfiction,” which is an idea I had always wanted to engage with in my papers for school, even before I knew what it was called. In Writing Assessment and Instruction (TE 848) during my graduate studies, I was reintroduced to that way of thinking. The book for the course, Real Writing: Modernizing the Old School Essay, made a strong argument for authentic voice. The opening sentence of the book claims that it “makes the bold arguments that our students will become more engaged in the art of composing and that they will develop identities as powerful essayists when they are encouraged to produce real texts for authentic audiences and purposes” (p 7). It was incredibly validating to have my long-term suspicions confirmed. I had always instinctually felt that having a voice and writing genuinely in that voice is a far more important skill than being able to write a variation on the same essay that every single freshman in the country writes on To Kill a Mockingbird. My casual tone is charming and fun to read, and I refuse to change it. Engaging in my action research for that course about mini writing communities (which can be viewed in my showcase of work) showed me how students being able to write what they wanted was so much more valuable to them than other aspects of writing. The students did not care about writing alone vs. writing with friends. They cared about writing about topics that interested them. This translates into a greater overall lesson about treating students as individuals and how allowing them to interact with the things that interest them results in desirable learning outcomes. This is another way in which my relationship in the educational community was able to flourish and grow as a result of my master’s program. While classroom instructors may be constrained by expectations of curriculum, I as a tutor have more freedom to encourage students to explore what brings them interest. I have the ability to support the classroom teachers by helping students become engaged and authentic writers. I also have realized that promoting authenticity is important in other areas besides writing. This is something I additionally explored in Policies, Practices, and Procedures in Special Education (CEP 840). Students who think differently or have disabilities need the space to engage in content authentically. My unique position as a one-on-one educator provides me with more opportunity to let students explore in the ways that they want to.

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The third course that changed my relationship with my role as an educator was Teaching Science for Understanding, TE 861A. I went into the course expecting it to be very similar to Teaching School Mathematics, which I had taken first. Both courses were for my degree concentration and because of that I expected them to have a similar tone and curriculum. Teaching School Mathematics focused on pedagogy and motivating students to appreciate mathematics using similar tactics to Developing Positive Attitudes in Learning. (As an aside, taking Math and Positive Attitudes the same semester created an incredible synergy in themes, making that my favorite semester of my degree program.) Teaching Science for Understanding focused on two main areas: applying Next Generation Science Standards and promoting social justice in science education. My senior year in high school, my AP Calculus teacher told me I was stupid and bad at math. I had always loved math and science, and tended to score higher in those areas on standardized tests. I also loved arts and spent my youth dancing and performing in plays. Once my math teacher had told me I was stupid at math repeatedly, I decided to pursue the study of the arts and humanities in college. In Teaching Science for Understanding, we explored how common this phenomenon is across all of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and how common it is for all minority groups. We listened to a podcast from Black women scientists, read an article on Deaf students of color going to science camp, and explored writing about bigotry queer folks face in the scientific community. The objective of this line of examination was to investigate how important it is to make all students feel welcome in the sciences and to normalize minority groups in STEM. Minority students will continue to shy away from math and science as long as it is perceived as a club for straight, white men. For one of my projects in that class, I focused on finding women who made contributions to the areas I most often tutor in sciences, to help normalize women in science for my students. One of the areas I tutor most often is chemical bonding in chemistry. I read an entire forty-two page paper on the history of atomic bonding theory and there were zero women mentioned in the entire paper. Normalizing women in science turned out to be more difficult than I expected. How does one say “Look at all these women in science!” when there are not very many examples? I know that part of the challenge was that I was trying to find women in specific areas of study, but the fact that it was impossible sometimes was discouraging. This course helped me develop my role as an educator who advocates for equality and social justice in learning. I am currently in the course Learning Mathematics with Technology, and we are also exploring social justice in that class. Even small assumptions about people’s lives can perpetuate stereotypes and make students feel excluded in subtle ways. Educators have a duty to be aware of inequalities and make choices that help minimize them. Teaching Science for Understanding made me aware of that fact.

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I started my master’s degree in 2021 with the primary goal of “being better at my job.” What I imagined that being at the time was primarily pedagogy-related, I think. It’s sometimes hard to remember pre-conceptions after the fact. I know that gaining validation and a sense of my place in the educational community was an unexpected benefit. I was always a “real” educator and I am so grateful to all of my professors who gave me the space to realize it. Nearly all of my professors additionally appreciated my perspective as an educator not in a classroom. My different experience provided useful perspectives in class discussions. In addition to my sense of belonging, I learned three main lessons from different courses in my degree program. All three of these lessons helped me reframe my approach to my job. Even though I had already seen my role as being someone who motivates, Developing Positive Attitudes in Learning showed me many research-supported strategies on how to do that more effectively. Writing Assessment and instruction showed me the value of authenticity in writing, but it also showed how important it is to give students opportunities to be authentic in other ways. Students are unique individuals with unique interests and allowing them to explore their individuality helps with learning outcomes. The course Teaching Science for Understanding helped me see the importance of social justice in education. All of this together finally made me feel like a real teacher, despite the fact that now I see how I had been all along.