MY WPI EDUCATION

MY MATHEMATICS COURSES

One comment that I often received after observations was that I seemed to have "no trouble" with the content for the classes that I was teaching, and that I seemed "completely capable" of teaching any course or material that was thrown at me. Now, while I must say that I am highly adaptable and I do not doubt that I am capable of anything that I would like to be capable of ... teaching some of my courses was still quite a challenge. Not only had I not seen a lot of the topics that I was to cover since junior high (such as Algebra I or Geometry), but at WPI, if I had relearned the topics, it was in a much more advanced context.

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What I was able to bring to my students was the concept of relevance. It is no secret that students are less receptive to learning specific topics when they find them useless. However, I always liked to share my seeds of wisdom with my students whenever I could. I had to teach my seniors about systems of equations, so I related them to real-life issues such as tipping points and phone bill plans and buying a car. The students who were in Financial or Auto Tech shops especially appreciated this, but so did my students who work after school or who provide for their families to the point where this topic is scarily relevant to their lives. I brought in what I'd learned over the years about those systems and some of the word problems that I'd seen in my own math courses in linear algebra, etc. at WPI and combined it with facts that I knew from my mother, who is a financial advisor and has been teaching me about bills and loans since a young age. The students perked up whenever I brought in an application where they may not have seen the math fitting in before I mentioned it. I also liked to encourage students who were thinking of attending college to not be deterred by upper-level math topics, such as calculus. I told them how I was taking a freshman physics course that term at WPI, and integration was just an assumed part of the course, as it was so necessary for the calculations that we were doing. I recalled a tidbit that one of my own high school teachers had mentioned when I was first learning trigonometry, about how he had worked as an engineer and had predicted the weather using matrices and derivatives. Math is everywhere, and I loved to make sure that my kids knew that, especially as they prepared to graduate!

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I also had to teach my Inclusion Geometry students how to do proofs. From scratch. I spent my entire practicum working with these kids, so I mostly know how they are wired to think about things, yet they never fail to surprise me or to throw a curveball in what they totally understand or what they still do not get after three weeks of talking about it. At WPI, I've learned about proofs, too! These, however, are much more complicated proofs. I needed to break them down in a way that my students could take in their basic concept and not shrink away from the challenge or from problems that they do not recognize. After all, proofs tend to test the exact reasoning that my Inclusion students are most afraid of: figuring out the steps for how to solve a problem on their own. In fact, I had one student ask me about a month into our proofs unit, "Miss, why does this even matter? Like, are we ever going to use this again after the MCAS?" That prompted me to reach back into my WPI Days of being absolutely lost on the concept of proofs or why we had to memorize theorems, such that I could give her the honest answer that proofs are relevant in daily life because we go through the process of decision-making and the steps of problem solving when we are making even mundane decisions, such as the route to walk to school or whether we would like to grab coffee along the way. Due to my understanding and empathy from standing exactly in her shoes during Real Analysis at WPI and wondering why on Earth any of this even mattered, I came up with an analogy on the the spot that I continued to use when the kids needed an extra example or to check back in with the root concept of proofs. I even reiterated this example in my culturally responsive Proofs Project packet!

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I made sure that students kept their notes and their tests, homework, etc. in a binder along with a table of contents. This was my mentor teacher's idea to begin with, and I definitely took it in stride. I know from my first few disorganized years at WPI that keeping everything together is key, so that we can focus on one thing at a time and not be overwhelmed by missing crucial notes or helpful pieces of paper (especially during quizzes, where I allowed students to use their in-class notes!). I noticed about midway into my practicum, when performing a binder check, that students tend to copy things down exactly as I write them on the board, so I took advantage of this when offering worksheets and I told them to model how I was copying something into the blank space of their margins. I also gave out a lot of worksheets rather than textbook work, not only because I knew that many kids walked to school or had limited internet access and would appreciate paper work rather than heavy books or computer work at home, but since I knew from my own education that guidance and worksheets just make homework so much more enjoyable, accountable, and easy to keep track of in terms of skill capability & completion.

MY TEACHER PREP COURSES

Through the Teacher Preparation Program (TPP), I had to complete a series of psychology and pedagogical-based courses in order to make it to where I am today. I knew that I was going to join the TPP when I agreed to attend WPI, so I took my very first TPP-specific course, School Psychology, during A-Term (first quarter) of my freshman year, back in the Fall of 2017. There, I met one of my biggest inspirations in the teaching world, a close friend of mine (and fellow member of my sorority) named Victoria Mercouris. Although Victoria was a Robotics Engineering major, she was preparing to teach physics at Worcester Tech during the following semester, and I got to spend almost every day with her throughout that experience, whether it was proof-reading her upcoming exams, checking homework completion, or sorting through her comic-strip-based Newton's Law poster projects for grading. Victoria currently works as a makers space / computer science teacher in New Orleans, and that goes to show how inspiring she was to me when it came to carving a path for myself and accomplishing such an intimidating task as preparing to take over my own classroom!

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The remainder of the Teaching Prep courses gave me such a new perspective on how to lead a classroom and how to be a better student and teacher to everyone that I meet. I got to bond with a lot of other TPP hopefuls during Psych of Education in D-Term of 2018, where I also learned a lot more about the Assistments software that my students have to work with over the summer, helping me to capture a clearer picture of their technological capacity.

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I got to take ID3100, a teaching methods course, during D-Term of 2019 with Mr. John Staley, the assistant principal at Doherty Memorial High School. Mr. Staley taught me all about the concept of an MCAS (as I am from Illinois, where we do not have anything even remotely similar past the eighth grade) and about the standards that schools need to meet before State intervention is required. He also gave a lot of helpful lesson plan feedback. I like to look back at my very first mock lesson presentation that he made us complete for the course, and I sort of laugh and marvel at myself. My board organization was shoddy at best, my lesson plan was all over the place, and I crammed way too much material into a singular lesson, with the lesson sort of falling apart and not really wrapping up very nicely when I could not cover everything in it. Not to mention the fact that my Problem of the Day involved organizing coins into towers, and I did not obtain any coins prior to my presentation, so I resorted to an odd sketch on the board and told my "class" to imagine a stack of coins instead before proceeding to talk about cross-sections (with the entire point of the coins being a tangible representation of a cross-section!). I was able to take the good aspects of my lesson, like my consideration of alternative learning styles and my bravery to tackle an arbitrary topic, and run with it while refining my white-board organization and lesson plan layouts along my actual teaching journey.

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Finally, during A-Term of 2019 (and during the first half of my student teaching practicum), I took a Sheltered English Immersion course that integrated so seamlessly into my ELL Instruction. Dr. Boucher-Yip definitely recognized and dispelled my insecurities about working with English Learning students and about making an effective impact on their education. The strategies that I learned in that class helped me to be more inclusive in my lesson planning -- even for all of my classes! -- and opened my eyes to the different ways in which I could get my message across to students, such as individualizing instruction with personal white boards, or with using alternative vocabulary when necessary or possible. I definitely noticed myself implementing these communication and proper modification strategies with any of my students who needed them, as well as being considerate of these gaps when I needed a wake-up call on students' grasp of the material.

MY SPANISH COURSES

I have been taking Spanish since the seventh grade, and as I exited high school with an Illinois Certification of Biliteracy, I entered WPI intending to earn my minor in the language. While that plan did not quite fit into my schedule while still allowing me to graduate in three years, I was able to fulfill my WPI Humanities requirement with six various Spanish language and cultural courses, all of which helped to refresh my memory as I interacted with my students.

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Worcester Tech has a rather robust hispanic and latinx demographic, and I particularly had to respond to this when it came to my English Language Learners, or ELLs (although I had to keep my students' backgrounds in mind during all of my classes, when it really came down to it). When I compiled the data during Week 1 about the lingual and locational origins of my ELL students, I noticed that over half of them originated from countries that recognize some dialect of Spanish as their national first language.

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Not only did the language barrier prevent the material from being graspable for each student, but some educational gaps existed as well, depending on when the students had joined the American Public School system. While many of these students were Level 4 or Level 5 on the ELL Proficiency Scale, I had students from every Level 1–6, and it was especially my Level 1 student that required a specific type of instruction to make it through my class. However, since I am fluent in Spanish and could at least understand some of her confusion, I was able to communicate some of the topics to her in alternative ways (besides just modifying tests or plainly translating material), both before I took over the class and after I became the teacher of record for my ELL Algebra I students.