Middle School Student Indian + Chinese Female Q: What do you have in common with your teachers? A: I hate the weekends. I have five extracurricular activities, which is not a lot compared to some people. Three of the activities are on Saturday, and two activities are on Sunday. My older sister has seven extracurricular activities and six of them on the weekend so it is even busier to take us both to some different classes. I like my extracurricular activities, but it is extremely chaotic. In fifth grade we did a vote to see what our favorite weekday is. I was the only one who picked Monday. My teacher never understood why I picked Monday because he did not try to find the reason. I was very surprised that he did not try to find out why because he was the person that always asks “why?” to everything. Actually, I did not even have this in common with my classmates either. What I learned from this experience is that people, especially teachers, will not always try to get to know you and you will not always get the opportunity to get to share things about yourself. If you do not get the opportunity to share a little bit about yourself then the teacher will not know the similarities and they will not think that he or she can relate to you. From this experience, I also noticed how important it is to have even the smallest connection to a teacher, it can help you agree on things to make your classroom community better. Q: Does it matter that students and teachers have things in common? A: Yes, I think it is important to have things in common with your teachers because it helps you and your teacher have a better connection in school. By having similarities the teacher can get to know you better and put that into your learning to help you learn in a better fitting way. It can also help with communication. It will help you communicate and talk to your teacher without feeling like talking to a total stranger. A teacher looking at their students will probably think of them as stereotypical kids in their grade if they do not want to put in the effort to notice them as individuals. Without having a connection with your teacher or student, it is going to be hard to understand who they are as a person. At school, they might act a lot different than they actually are to show the perfect impression towards their teachers or other students. It is also important to have things in common with your teacher because that way they can have empathy instead of sympathy. Instead of just feeling bad for your teacher or student you can relate and imagine what it was like in their shoes. This allows the teacher and student to have a more personal bond so they feel more comfortable talking to each other with more personal things.
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Middle School Student Chinese Male Q: What do you have in common with your teachers? A: In California, teachers were treated with the utmost respect. Everyone wanted to be a teacher. One day, I was thinking about all the things that were the same and different about California teachers and Washington teachers. I was also thinking about one specific teacher, my favorite teacher, Mrs. Hogan. Mrs. Hogan was my 2nd and 3rd grade teacher. For many years, I had thought Mrs. Hogan and I were really different. But when I really came to think about it, we weren’t that different from each other. When she was small, her last name was also made fun of just like mine. Hogan is a word for an Indian hut. My last name was also made fun of, everyone thought that it was a stupid name and very funny. There are also other things that made us the same too. For example, our families both immigrated to America and we all had relatives that had fought in a war. We both also loved pizza and lasagna because she is Italian. Even her friends were similar to mine. Her friends loved to watch football (even though they support the Packers and I just liked the Patriots). Her friends loved to run and be active rather than play video games and it was the same with my friends. I think that having things alike impacts you no matter what those things are. Q: Does it matter that students and teachers have things in common? A: Even though I said that being alike impacts you, I don’t think that you need to be alike. Being alike with a teacher can be good in many ways. You can still be very good without being alike with a teacher. Having things in common with a teacher makes you want to come to school to be with your teacher. If you are too alike, than you will start going to school just to see your friends and the teacher and you won't actually try to study or anything. Still, wanting to come to school is better than not coming to school. My mother didn’t really have that much in common with her teachers. Still, she still has a good job. Middle School Student Chinese Female Q: What do you have in common with your teachers? A: Both my teachers and I share many similar day to day experiences. We all live or interact with the same community and setting, be it school or the greater Seattle area, so many of the things they run into I have dealt with as well. My teachers will tell the class about an experience they had with traffic, SEATAC airport, or someone at the grocery store, and I am able to relate to it. Even their childhood stories and personal preferences coincide with mine at times. Some days I've had conversations about pets, foods, and TV shows that both my teachers and I absolutely adore. Other times we complain together about not wanting to run or wake up early! Q: Does it matter that students and teachers have things in common? A: I believe it is essential that students and teachers have things in common and share them as well. Personally, I know it's sometimes easy to get caught up in the grading aspect of school. At times, I'll forget the ultimate goal is to learn from my mistakes rather than just being upset about them. Shared interests and experiences make it so in the eyes of students, teachers are not just the people that critique and stamp letters onto our work. When I can relate to who I am learning from, I feel I can better reflect on the suggestions and markings I see. I know the person who wrote them understands personally what I go through on a day to day basis, and I know they want me to improve. High School Student Chinese + Jewish Male Q: What do you have in common with your teachers? A: My friends and I don’t necessarily seek out connection with our teachers at school, and some might say we even actively avoid it, but then again, that is kind of normal for students. I feel perhaps a little more common ground between me and my teachers than the majority of kids, because I enjoy writing and performing and learning and creating and many of the things that teachers do every day. I’ve even considered becoming a teacher myself in time, although that’s way too far off to be certain. The reality is that most often times it’s a love-hate relationship that sits between me and my teachers, for at the same time that I admire what they stand for and share so many interests with them, actually being a student in any public school sort of drives you crazy, as you probably know. Worksheets and standardized tests and long essays... I see these traditional methods of dealing with a large number of kids at once like a type of education mass-production, with all the same compromises and artificial feelings of a literal factory, and an obstacle to being able to relate to anyone who works as part of this institution, whether or not they want it that way. Q: Does it matter that students and teachers have things in common? A: It matters incredibly much. It’s so much harder to learn from someone who doesn’t understand you. There are ways around this barrier, and as students, we often find ourselves spending most of our time meddling with them: watching tutorials online, learning from each other, taking excessive amounts of notes, cheating, but nothing eases the process like having someone who is devoted to finding what makes your brain click. In my experience this has gotten better and better throughout my school years. We have websites designed to be more attractive to us by interweaving the worlds of social media and academics, and programs to help us form healthier relationships with our peers and mentors, but in the end it’s up to the individual to make it all work out, and the reward for both sides is that we want to learn. It feels meaningful. We want to complete the assignments, not just for our GPA’s and scholarships, but for the sake of learning and growing into better people. Photo (c) 2017 Kristin Leong High School Student Korean Female Q: What do you have in common with your teachers? A: At my school, it seems like my teachers and I are all busy. We are all busy with school, our families, our responsibilities. Sometimes, how busy our personal lives get impact our school lives, and it seems to be the same for teachers. But it's weird, we lack a mutual understanding of how busy we may all be, even though it's obvious--we all have our own lives. I don't really know my teachers this year on a personal level, so I can only base our similarities on what I can see, and we all have our hands full with many, many things. However, I can recall times in past years when similarities between students and teachers were truly beneficial to my education. When I used to live in California, my kindergarten class consisted of mainly Spanish-speaking students. Because the target language at my school was English, this language barrier would have been extremely detrimental to all my classmates had our teacher been unable to speak Spanish and English. Unfortunately for me, neither English or Spanish was my first language – I was a native born Korean who had just immigrated to the US. Though I struggled to catch up to the language levels of my friends, I was still able to enjoy school as our teacher, who was bilingual herself, was understanding of all our language barriers. Additionally, I distinctly remember my principal and a 5th grade teacher. They were the only Asian staff, one of them being Korean, which really helped out my mom (who could rarely help me with school as she was also native Korean), which helped with my education there as well. One of my first experiences with the American school system truly showed me the importance of having commonalities with a teacher. Q: Does it matter that students and teachers have things in common? A: Yes! Regardless of how much a student and a teacher may have in common, any similarities can help start a bond between them. As a student, I know that often times, teachers are held up to certain standards and ideals. When teachers are stereotyped as a general mass of people, it's hard to see them as individuals. When that happens, it's hard to even begin to relate with them, let alone have the WANT to relate with them. Because it's so much easier to understand and learn from someone you relate to, having a connection to a teacher is really important. Photo (c) 2017 Kristin Leong |
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