My MEL experiences

Environment- Helping students succeed. Back in high school my stats teacher was extremely hard on students. She expected nothing but the best from everyone. Although this class was extremely challenging and she made you do work over and over again she provided almost all of her time day in and day out for students to come get extra help. If someone missed a class she would devote 45 minutes of her time to go over what happened in class and she would make sure that the student understood everything prior to leaving the class. The environment which she provided for us was steady across the board and everyone felt that she pushed us equally as hard.

Experience- Hands on Experience. In my Chemistry class the teacher would always try to follow her lesson up with an experiment or hands on activities. The activities and experiments which we did in the class further explained the lessons and were easier to remember when taking tests and quizzes that activities always jumped back into my head.

Experience- Learning Styles experience- The best history class which I have ever been in was back in 8th grade. My teacher came up with an idea to dissect the song We Didn’t Start The Fire by Billy Joel. The classes which followed not only taught us a lot about history, but also the writing incorporated English too. This class was not only fun, but a great learning experience and I will always remember singing and dancing around the classroom with all of my peers.

Interests- motivation interests- Teachers have all different ways to motivate their students, but sometimes the best way is grabbing the student’s interest. When students are forced to take classes which don’t appeal to them it is already challenging. The teacher can help make it easier by making the class interesting and tying in life experiences to gain interest. One of my science teachers did this in high school and it made the class that much more enjoyable.

Meaning- Connections- When students can connect the learning to real life or can connect it with past classes it is more enjoyable to learn. In high school as the classes in math continued to get more and more difficult it was always reassuring to look back and see how past classes are helping you understand the material in the more difficult math classes. In math everything builds on top of each other and it gives significant value to even the most simple math problems.