Traversing Teaching-Lilli Massey

     From my incredibly limited experience, being a teacher is one of the most rewarding, and exhausting jobs there is. As a teacher, you want to make sure all of your students are happy and safe. You want to be the teacher that everybody loves and wants to get. However, all of these "perfect" teachers have likely given up countless hours of unpaid work and made many sacrifices in order to achieve this. If one day, your kids are coming into the classroom and you notice one of your students seems really tired, and isn't really engaging in the lesson like they normally would. Everyone has off days, maybe they just didn't get enough sleep last night. But as the week goes on, you notice that this student still seems out of it, and they start missing assignments and you start to get the idea that something else may be going on at home. Of course, you can't stop the whole class to go and check in with this student, but it would be good to find a time, maybe during indep...

  Is Schooling Equitable? To answer this question, I think we need to first know the definition of the word. according to the Merriam Webster, to be equitable is to be able to be made equal. To reach this, schools must always be fair to all students. Now knowing this definition, I feel I can make my own opinion. No, I do not think schooling is equitable; I think that it should be, but in American history it has yet to be so. Recently, Graduate students at Stanford and USC came up with a new way of tracking schooling and housing segregation in the U.S. called the ‘Segregation Index’. This new tool “shows American schools remain highly segregated by race, ethnicity, and economic status.” Not only does this show segregation is still happening but growing in our larger districts. This is very disheartening for me, because we know that segregation is wrong, but nothing is being done to prevent it from continuing.     While our schools may not be segregated the same ways, they ...

"When we are young, we are taught the definition between a hero and a villain... good and evil. A savior and a lost cause. But I've learned the only real difference is just who's telling the story." Hope Mikaelson. I myself have never been much of a history buff. I cannot recall when it happened, but there was a point in my life when I made the realization, history is only ever told by the winners; since then I have been a bit skeptical if what we are taught is the whole truth. I think a great example of this is colonization, of ANYWHERE. In our early education, we learned about European colonization of North America. However, for much of our education, we are told only about how europeans moved in and everyone played nice, traded goods, and enjoyed meals together. We dont learn about how Europeans also murdered anyone who refused to leave their homes or convert to their ways of living until we are older. Of course, we should not be teaching young elementary school st...

     Lilli Massey  In the past few years of my education, many people have raised the question, what is the purpose of public school. The simplest answer would of course be, to teach kids how to be functioning young adults, equipping them with the skills needed to be useful members of society. So that means making sure they understand how to find slope, understand Shakespeare, and most importantly, that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Right? Thats what our teachers have  to teach us to be considered "good" teachers by the school boards. I however, think that schools have a much more important role, outside of getting the grade s. Schools should be a place where students feel safe and accepted for who they are, not what they can accomplish. In fact, the Texas Government states that " The mission of the public education system of this state is to ensure that all Texas children have access to a quality education that enables...

Why teach? For my whole life, I struggled to find a path that I thought really spoke to me. Sure, I would find hobbies, and spark new interests, but nothing I could really see myself doing long term. Looking back on my childhood, I really should have known I loved teaching from the start, considering I always tried to “play school” with my younger brother, which involved me writing out mini lessons or practice problems for my very unwilling student.🙈 Not to mention I come from at least two generations of teachers from both sides of my family. I finally realized that I wanted to teach when I got to Highschool. I was a member of the band, and it was one of the first organizations I felt truly accepted in. By my senior year, I had collected nearly every leadership position in the program short of drum major, because I loved being the person who people would look to for help or guidance. My directors often asked why I wasn’t interested in drum major, and I never really had much of an answ...