C4T Summary #2

For this Comments for Teachers (C4T), I was assigned to read posts on the blog Life of an Educator by Justin Tarte. The first post I read was 10 ways to be a great teacher. This post was a remake of an earlier post entitled 10 ways to be a terrible teacher by Vicki Davis. In his post, he list 10 essential ways to be a great and successful teacher. He made very excellent points in this post. The one that really stood at the most to me is that "Great teachers will always value the relationships with their students over everything else. Great teachers know that when the students know you care and know you are there to help, there is nothing that can't be done or accomplished..." In my comment, I told him how much I agreed with that statement because if there is not a valued relationship between students and teachers, students will not be motivated to do much. More than likely the students will try to only do the bare minimum. Students are not the only ones who have to learn. Teachers are learning as well and without a healthy relationship between students and teachers, we will not be able to learn from them.

The second post I viewed was Make A Kid Smile. Once again, this is an excellent post dealing with student teacher relationships. In this post, he talks about this program they have instituted at his school where they reward students for a variety of achievements such as academic improvement, going above and beyond, or even just all around good citizenship. This is a very good program because students being rewarded may feel the need to do better in order to continue to be rewarded. Other students may also feel the need to do better so they can be rewarded as well. In my comment, I agreed with Mr. Tarte and also expressed my view on this idea. I agreed with him and explained my opinion that students who only receive negative reinforcement or nothing at all for the work they achieve may only do the bare minimum required to get by. However, if students receive more positive reinforcement they may become more eager and motivated to achieve. I would like to thank Justin Tarte for his post and recommend everyone to view his blog. It is very resourceful and insightful for people who want to become an educator.