TWYH chapters 6-14

I like how Erin takes her students outside of their comfort zone and gets to actually see what it is like for her students to come to her neighborhood. She finds out who is a good person and who has huge problems with the work that she is doing for these kids. I think it is a good lesson to learn when Erin’s home phone number turned up in the newspaper. She learned that not everybody is going to support you for doing the right thing. Sometimes you have to just stand up for what you think is right and go with it. Erin learned a lot about herself and her students in these chapters. This is an important step that all teachers need to take in order to relate to their students. It is also good to learn how to present yourself to important people that are interested in your work; Erin learns this lesson when she tells a story and swears during it to Steven Spielberg in a big meeting.

I think that the big lesson to be learned in this section is to always fight for what you think will benefit your students. It doesn’t matter how unpopular you are with your colleagues, the important thing is that your students are getting meaningful lessons from what you are teaching them. Erin started off her student teaching more after getting to the bottom of things and wanting to make sure that everyone got involved. However, her second year she wanted to kind of follow the rules that the school had made. She realized that she had a much harder time connecting with these students because there wasn’t as much hands on involvement. All teachers need to try and find the happy medium between breaking all of the rules and being able to connect with the majority of their students through the lessons. Erin is still learning how to do this at the end of the chapters.

TWYH chapters 1-5

Erin took advantage of a potentially bad situation in her classroom with the drawing. She talks about the Holocaust and tries to take her students on a field trip to a Holocaust museum. Erin shows that if any teacher tries hard enough that all students can go on field trips and learn. Erin learned that her students can be engaged and good students; they just have to be interested in the topic.
It is good that Erin took a stand and took her students to the museum and learned a lot about their lives. It really gave her a chance to be able to connect to her students and tailor lesson plans more to them. Also, Erin’s father kept questioning what she was doing teaching in the area that she had chosen and why she was getting so involved with her students. She stood her ground and kept doing everything in her power to make a difference in these students learning. Eventually it paid off and she got to stay and get paid for connecting with her students.