My MEL Experiences

Student-Teacher Relationships: In preschool, my teacher, Mrs. Glidden, helped us make wagons for the annual Teddy Bear Picnic. Each wagon was supposed to reflect the personality of the individual teddy bear. My birthday had just passed, and I had a brand-new teddy bear that I couldn't wait to bring along. The issue was, the bear was taller than I was, and I was the shortest in the class! By asking me basic questions about Mr. Roy (named so because I couldn't say corduroy), such as what his favourite colour was and if he liked peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I learned to trust her enough to let her help me make a cardboard wagon big enough to fit Mr. Roy.

Autonomy: Junior year of high school, my World History II teacher, Mr. Caulfield, set up an original strategy game revolving around World War II. He split the entire class up into the countries that played a key role in beginning the war; Italy, Britain, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Spain, and Russia. Though we could stray away from the historically accurate moves, each play had a different outcome card that he created, depending on which choice we made. To actually play the role of ambassador rather than watch a film and read about the beginning of the war in a book was far more interesting, and even moreso when we were able to make choices that effected the entire outcome of the game.

Learning Styles: Mr. Blackstone, my fourth and fifth grade teacher, disregarded the possibility of different learning styles within the first month of school. He told us that the only way to learn the multiplication tables were to make flashcards, and to practice them as much as possible. Because I have a dislike for mathematics because the entire subject is difficult for me to comprehend, I didn't memorize them like everyone else did. When I got to sixth grade, Ms. Banton made a game of it: Around the World. Because it was a competitive game, rather than flashcards, I was motivated to do well.

Helping Students Succeed: Again, in Mr. Blackstone's class, I was perusing research topics for our East Asia unit. I saw three that interested me, so I wrote all of them down and brought them to him. On the paper were 'Japanese art,' 'martial arts', and 'weapons,' the latter because I was interested in all martial arts and affiliated subjects. He circled the first one and told me that it would be the best one for me because, 'Girls don't do karate and besides, you know nothing about weapons anyway.'

Context: My high school French teacher, Monsieur Paradis, believed that the only way for us to really learn French was to use it in an everyday setting. If we asked a question, we asked it in French. The most popular was, 'Est-que je peux allez au toilette?' One block period, he herded us onto a bus and instructed the driver to go to inner Portland, where we stopped at a French cafe. We were only to speak French to each other and the waiter. Everyday experiences for mundane things like requesting to use the bathroom or ordering food were his ways of encouraging us to learn at least conversational French.