My Personal Praxis Statement

My Personal Praxis Statement

As a college student, I often find myself inundated with work. To make it worse, these assignments usually are uninteresting and irrelevant. It is in the midst of these tedious exercises that I begin to wonder whether all of this work is worth it. When this issue creeps into my mind, I think back to my reasons for choosing to pursue this profession. When I started college, I knew that I could not function in a typical nine to five job. The banality and predictability of such a career simply did not appeal to me. So that essentially ruled out any course of study which would lead to such an occupation. I also knew that I wanted a job that would allow me to make a difference in people’s lives. My mind carefully contemplated the list of possible vocations, and ultimately the field of education seemed to possess the strongest appeal. A teaching career, I figured, would allow me to have a strong impact on the lives of young people. I wanted to help them grow both as students and as people, just as my teachers had done for me. So, despite the warnings of many current teachers, I enlisted myself in a curriculum devoted to teacher preparation.

Looking back, I believe that the correct choice was made. Obviously, I cannot know for sure until I immerse myself in the waters of a full-time teaching position. Perhaps I will come to find that the field of education is not what I expected. Maybe I will be unable to get through to my students. Who knows—these are all possibilities. I think about these possibilities from time to time, and they always scare me. Devoting four years of my life to something only to fail at that pursuit would be devastating. Despite these fears, ...

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...simply reuses the same approach and methodology each year, his class is likely to become boring and ineffective. In order to properly educate students, a teacher must always be looking for ways to improve his course—methods of making the knowledge seem more interesting and relevant to students. Originality and innovation not only maintain students’ attention, but also help keep teachers interested. Any subject matter will seem boring if an instructor teaches it the same way for twenty years. In order to maximize the effectiveness of their teaching, educators constantly must be in search of new methods of presenting content. Complacency, after all, is the first step on the road to ineffective instruction. Teachers, like their students, must always remain motivated by the desire to improve. Without this desire, the process of education becomes stagnant and empty.