EDRG 3321 Teacher Blog

One of my favorite teachers when I was growing up was my 5th grade homeroom teacher, Mr. Folks. Mr. Folks was always willing to go above and beyond to help any of his students in our classroom. There was never a time when he wouldn’t hesitate to have any of his students come in early, stay late, or find any extra time that worked on both schedules where they could meet and have some one-on-one help.

He was also great at finding different and elaborates, fun ways to teach our subjects. He was the main math teacher for the entire 5th grade. I’m sure that math must have been his favorite subject in class because you could tell that he had a true passion for it. His room was constantly filled with books, posters, computer programs, games, and activities that were math-based. During his class, he would focus on his lecture and curriculum, but afterwards he would give us time to go around the classroom and play some of the games, or computer programs, whatever we wanted to do. Then, he would ask us to write down and turn in a piece of paper just stating one thing we learned in class and one thing we learned doing our extra activities, even if it doesn’t relate to anything we were learning currently in the classroom.

Mr. Folks also found ways to make learning fun. He had the personality of a kid, so he was easily relatable. He had that fun enthusiastic, outgoing interest about math and was constantly pulling each of his students in with him by having us participate. Until him, I had been used to going to classes that had been mainly focused on TAKS testing and preparation for it. They were strictly based on that, with no elaboration on any other aspects or concepts. His class was completely different. He managed to incorporate all of the testing material in his curriculum as well as elaboration and further explanation onto each subject. I believe that all of these things about Mr. Folk made him a great teacher and I plan to incorporate the same aspects in my classroom and my teachings.