Three Teachers and The Lessons They Taught Me

    Throughout my time in elementary, middle, high school, and even now in college  I have been impacted from my teachers who have instructed me. Sometimes this impact is how the teachers' had hoped with me as their student gaining a sense of how a particular societal brief operates in the real world or the proper way to formulate a hypothesis when conducting a chemistry experiment how light fractures through different liquids. In order to understand how a few teachers have impacted me, I need to explain what I was laking prior to taking these classes.

6th Grade - English - Ms. Centrella

    As a avid reader English was a subject I generally did not struggle

with English...until it came to Ms. Centrella's grammar quizzes. I hated them. I would dread going to her class to take them. Those 10 question quizzes were the bane of my existence. Needless to say, turns out I was terrible at grammar and as someone who grew up in a household where getting a B was unacceptable, the fear of it lowering my grade was quit upsetting. After an entire year of taking those quizzes, my grammar did slowly improve and my tolerance for taking quizzes in which I hate the subject at hand also significantly increased. 

10th Grade - Chemistry - Mrs. Dare

    I always believed myself to be decent at the sciences. I never had too much trouble in any particular aspect. I never had trouble completing labs or understanding the concepts in other sciences until I

took Chemistry. I had a very hard time understanding concepts relating to conversion and balancing chemical equations. Of course, I would go to Mrs. Dare's office hours to have her explain the problems in a different manner and/or figure out specifically where I was making mistakes. In the end, her office hours did not help me and she did not alter her teaching method of those specific problems which resulted in me teaching myself how to solve them. I used youtube videos and articles online as my resources for learning how to solve these problems. In summary, from this class I learned how to successfully teach myself the curriculum.

11th Grade - Physics - Mr. McCulley

    The final teacher on this list is my physics teacher Mr. McCulley. Before taking his class my perspective on the sciences in general was pretty negative from struggling with the Chemistry class before. However, after taking his class my opinion on physics and science was much more positive. The reason why Mr. McCulley has had a huge impact on me is because of his teaching style and his passion for the job. What made his teaching style so different was that he would constantly be creating new problems for his classes. If there was students that played sports in his class he would go to their games, watch them and record them. These recordings would be shown in class and a problem would be created for

the class to solve. By the end of the year regardless of whether that student played sports of not they would have at least one problem that would either appear during class, on homework, or on a test that would need to be solved. Additionally, he would also write his own programs that would be used during labs or class time to show what larger scale experiments would look like if we changed the factors such as mass or velocity or the angle of fight. This showed me that he was very passionate about his work and through his new and interesting way of including students would really get my class to be engaged.

    Looking back on these three classes and my school experience as a whole I found that I learned the most as a result of a negative experience that I successfully overcame. Additionally, I tended to be more excited to learn if my teacher was very knowledgeable and passionate about the subject.

Have you had any similar experiences with your past teachers? Have you had a teacher just as passionate about teaching as my past teacher Mr. McCulley?