Hope for the Future

Tom Ward instilled a confidence in me I felt I lost 5 months into the program. This confidence was the ability to be creative. Like many other Macers, this one year program has really thrown me off my game with the amount of work I am suppose to do and the amount of information I am suppose to process in such a short period of time. I haven't been able to do what I normally like, which is reading outside of whats assigned in class and being able to just explore different avenues in general. This I feel has become even more important with the fact that I am student teaching and I would love to explore different ideas to use in the classroom. Tom said something however, at the beginning of class that help ease some of that tension in that he was in the same scenario when he was doing this program. When the program was over because he had learned what he had, he felt the need to always strengthen his craft and use different platforms as needed in order to do so. By saying this, Tom assured me that hopefully at the end of this program, I too can use the tools I have learned in it to push my way of thinking and making sure to turn over every rock to do so. Something else Tom showed me was how truly all social media sites in one form of another can help students when trying to explain a concept. While many of the different tech tools that have been presented in class I can see myself using, I really didn't see how both Facebook and Twitter could help in the classroom. Furthermore, because I have a heavy background in social psychology research from undergrad and focused a lot on empathy and narcissism, I was under the impression that these two specific sites with others, were doing a lot more harm than good. Funny enough, Tom showed through the social psychology realm that if one is truly seeing information through the lenses of their students and the background that they are coming from, that you can find tools in the least likely of places. Tom also showed how that not only one subject could dominate the realms of these social networking platforms. If one was to try using these websites in the classroom I figured that one would only do so in the field of humanities, not really giving much thought to stem, outside of just doing a video with whatever material was being covered. Mr. Ward showed, however, with the video of the basketball using geometry, just how wrong I was and even simplified a concept I had been struggling with for my MTTC Professional Readiness exam. He showed how a teacher can incorporate there own strengths (Tom being a coach) with students interest, in order to engage students in higher order thinking. All in all I really enjoyed Tom’s presentation and the aura of confidence that he showed throughout the entirety of the night (even when his presentation wasn’t working correctly in the beginning). I think he is an excellent example of how good a teacher can be with an extremely incredible work ethic and the open mindedness to explore new ideas, all with trying to help better teach different concepts to his students.