May 20, 2014

After reading the first three chapters of Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire I feel like I have already gotten to know Rafe as a teacher very well. The first thing that Rafe mentioned is that in a world full of athletes and superstars, the important people like scientists and policemen are seen as less important. I definitely agree with this statement. Without the doctors, policemen, and scientists of the world we would not be able to survive and yet the athletes and movie stars are getting the most attention. I think teachers are equally as important and are never given enough credit for what they do.
I think Rafe's teaching philosophy paper would have a main focus on trust. He talks a lot about how making your student's trust is very important to having a productive classroom. The worst thing you could do is run your classroom by fear. Both the students and the teacher are afraid. That does not make for an effective classroom, and it all come back to trust. If you run your classroom in a way that will make your students trust you, you will have control of your classroom without having to instill fear in your students.
Rafe would also add that you are a very important role model to your students. They are constantly watching you and will model their lives off of you whether you think they are or not. You need to be the teacher and person you want your students to grow up to be.
The six levels that Rafe talks about are very important and would be in his teaching philosophy paper. The levels start at student's acting a certain way to avoid getting in trouble and work up to them creating their own personal codes of behavior and following them. The last level is hard to reach and sometimes even adults have trouble with this. It is important to teach your students how to act not only to avoid getting in trouble, but because it is the right thing to do.
The last thing that Rafe would put in his teaching philosophy paper is the importance of reading and reading for fun. In the school that he works at a lot of students cannot read and to fix this they implemented a program where all classes read the same books and do the same activities. This takes away all of the fun from reading, and will cause students to not enjoy reading in the future. I remember when I was in elementary a different student would bring in their favorite book and everyday we would listen to that student read it out loud. It did not matter what book it was, there is always a lesson to be learned. Students need some freedom to learn however they choose. If everything in the classroom is micromanaged nothing will be learned.