Characteristics of an Effective Teacher

As I was growing up, I never pictured myself as a teacher. In fact, I grew up not respecting most of my teachers. Don’t get me wrong, some of my teachers were great. I had a few over the years that genuinely cared for their students, but I also had many who were there just to collect their paycheck and get all weekends, government holidays, and summers off. Even after graduating high school, I had no intentions of ever joining the educational field. Truthfully, I had no desire to attend college. I only attended three years of high school due to the fact that I was allowed to take my English three during summer school and thus skipped my junior year. During my senior year, I had made up my mind to join the United States Marine Corps and this is exactly what I did. I married my high school sweetheart the following summer. I tell you all of this because she is the inspiration of my desire to become a teacher. While I served the final three years of my contract in the Marine Corps, she completed her bachelors of science in Elementary Education.

Over the next several years I watched as she spent countless hours doing what she loved. She would come home and share stories every day that would inspire me later to follow in her footsteps. Never once did she suggest that I quit my job and go back to school, but that’s what I did. We would often joked about how nice it would be to count on one another as teachers. I have always been able to capture the attention of children. I enjoy their company and do not get annoyed like some adults do when children seem to go on and on about nothing important. I realize that it is important to the child that is doing the rambling. I often imagine about what my future classroom will look like, how my s...

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...trongest about. The time I spent in the Marine Corps taught me that no one had the knowledge to fix everything but if you would put a group of us together we could fix anything.

I look forward to one day starting my career in teaching but I know that there is a lot that I still have to learn between now and then. I feel that I own the four characteristics that I have described and paired with the information that I am currently learning, I will make a great teacher someday.

Bibliography

Routman, R. (2000). Conversations: Strategies for teaching, learning, and evaluating. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Weinstein, CC.S. (2011) Elementary Classroom Management: Lesson from Research and Practice, 5th Edition, New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Wong, H. (2004). How to be an effective teacher: The First Days of School. Mountain View, CA: Harry K Wong Publications, Inc.