Dispositional Blog #1: Respect

So, respect...a pretty important disposition in the teaching profession, without a doubt.  If you don't have the respect of your students, they won't take your subject, or you, seriously.  This opens up a whole new realm of issues: lack of control over the classroom, decreases in student initiative, and personal attacks on the teacher him/herself.

Respect is the recognition that someone has valuable information that you would like to obtain.  This recognition generally manifests itself in kindness, comfort, and trust.  Now to apply this to teaching...A teacher is respected when they are able to instill the value of their subject into their students.  A teacher who wants respect needs to make connections between their subject and the "real world."  Students aren't going to try at something that they don't find applicable to their own lives.  This development of respect takes time.  In order to apply your subject to each student, you have to know each student.  Get-to-know-you activities are often lame and time-consuming, but they're one easy way to get to know your kids a little bit.  In my experience, the most respected teachers are the ones who struck up random conversations before class started, asked "what are your weekend plans?" on Friday afternoons, and came to extracurricular activities to support kids in whatever they were doing.  They acknowledged the presence of other passions in students' lives, took note of them, and brought them into the conversation about history or math or art or whatever they were teaching. 

Take, for example, science.  I am a music major.  I was in band and choir in high school, and I hate hate hate hate hated lab sciences.  A lot.  (Still do...)  Science and music rarely play nicely together, but my high school physics teacher always made it to at least one choir concert a year.  He, seeing half his class up on that stage, thus knowing that there were many musical physicists in his class, relished the opportunity to demonstrate to us why we bothered taking physics.  We did this really great unit on the physics of sound...frequencies, pitch, sharping and flatting, beating and intonation, why intervals work the way they do, etc.  I walked into my first day of Theory I here at Luther, and, low and behold, I was assigned a chapter of reading on frequency and how it relates to pitch, sharping and flatting, beating, intonation, and intervalic relationships.  I emailed my physics teacher that night...he read my email to his class the next day.  Thanks, Hermon.  You rock.