Miss Arguello's Classroom

Hey all, long time no post! In my last posts, I was reflecting on my musings as a teacher assistant, wondering how to best connect with my students and feeling incredibly nervous for the future as I took on student teaching. Well, now the student teaching has come and gone. It is now less than ten days until Christmas, and the following things have happened: I had my student teaching placement in middle school mathematics under the WONDERFUL Tara Maynard (please go give her a follow on Twitter, she has literally made me a better teacher by a tenfold). I don't think I can fully explain how much this placement impacted me, so I will likely attempt to do so in a separate post later on.  I graduated from college! I now am the proud holder of a bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Secondary Education. The four and a half years paid off!  I have a job! I will be teaching middle school math this coming January in my OWN CLASSROOM! To say this isn't terrifying is a complete...

I haven't been sure how to ask this question for a long time. It's a question that has plagued me in the classroom, and on my commute home, I would wonder if I was wrong to be genuine with my students or if I should have been more honest with them. I was never sure how to deal with the question of how much I could reveal to my students, or how much I could help them based on my own personal experience. To be honest, I'm still not sure! But in my teaching experience and in conversation with my fellow teachers and peers, a constant question has run through my mind: Why are we afraid of being vulnerable with our students?  I am incredibly open with my peers about my various mental health issues, and I do so with the mentality that perhaps my story will help someone. Of course, I don't open with, "Hi, I'm Michiah, I have clinical anxiety, nice to meet you!" But at the same time, if one of my peers wants to know how they can cope with having a panic attack, ...

Remember when I posted about how nervous I was about teacher assisting? How about when I truly learned how difficult teaching is when I was in my first few weeks with my students? Now, I'm in the lat week of my teacher assisting placement, and I think I've learned more about teaching than ever before. While I learned everything about content from my classes, no amount of classes could have prepared me for what I experienced this semester with these wonderful kids. They have taught me more than I ever thought I could learn, and truly have helped me to become a more effective teacher. If I put everything I learned in one blog post, I would end up writing a novel, so let me condense me scope of knowledge to three main ideas that I have learned from my students: (1) students need to belong, (2) students need to know why they are learning what they are learning, and (3) students must be free to act independently. While these are inspired by my observations of my students, they are...

In my content seminar, we have been talking a lot about mathematical competency. This was inspired by Ilana Seidel Horn's book, Motivated, where she talks about various ways to make math class fun and engaging for every student. We started talking about this by asking: What competencies are valued in your math classroom? This led to my guiding question: When you look at your class roster, can you identify at least one way that makes each of your students mathematically smart?  Teachers Value Correctness Over Critical Thinking  In my own educational experience, both as a student and in observation, teachers have cared much more about if students obtain the "right" answer than if they ask good questions relating to the topic at hand. A question that could yield a "wrong answer" or something other than what the teacher has planned for the lesson is often met with "No....." or "Well, I don't think....". Why are we so quick to redirect st...

For anyone who has followed my blog for the last couple of years, you should know that I have been working toward my main goal of becoming a secondary mathematics teacher (hence the title). However, it wasn't until the beginning of this month that I was able to first get a glimpse of what my future is going to be like, when I stepped foot into a tenth grade geometry classroom with my fellow teacher assistant.  I told myself that teaching would be hard, that I would learn a lot of lessons, that I would make many mistakes as I first began my journey. Despite what I had told myself, I know now that the me of 2017 was a naive Pollyanna. Somehow, I expected my life to be like a Hallmark movie: I enter the classroom, and suddenly I realize I have this uncanny gift for teaching. The students love me immediately, every lesson I teach is wonderful, and the students develop an incredible passion for math. This may be an exaggeration of any expectations I truly had, but you get the gist: No...

What Makes a High School Teacher "Good"?  We have all had high school teachers that have made a significant impact on us. For one person I spoke with, her pre-calculus teacher was great because he encouraged students to ask questions and made every student feel as if they had a significant mathematical ability. Another woman’s favorite teacher was her high school English teacher, who had his students turn their desks into a circle and collaborate with one another, facilitating deep discussion and fostering a love of literature into his students. For another, her high school teacher stood out as being great because she helped her student to navigate some tough family issues in the midst of her depression, and allowed the student to seek solace from her, even though this went far beyond her role as a classroom educator. Besides personal testimony, various articles have also been written about the definition of a “good” teacher. One writer defined a good teacher by thei...