Becoming Coco

From First Year Teacher to Best Teacher Ever! How Can it Be Done? So you just started, or are about to start your first teaching job and you want to do everything you can to help your students. You’ve learned how to give assessments and use them to drive instruction, the basics of classroom management, how to teach each subject and differentiate for special needs and individual learning styles, you even learned a variety of activities or organization ideas that you want to implement. How do you synthesize this learning now and put it towards actually teaching? But wait, you don’t just want to do the minimum and rely only on what you have learned in school. No, you want to be a great teacher, the best teacher! You want students to be engaged in every lesson, to have fun learning even traditionally “dull” subjects, to love learning and become lifelong learners! You want your students to understand math concepts, not just memorize algorithms. You want students to use acade...

  A nd What it Taught me About Teaching and Learning Second Languages   Playing Fruit Ninja in China I am jealous of people who grew up bi-culturally or learned different languages at a young age. I secretly want to be them because in comparison my background is boring and as an adult it is hard to learn a new language. I feel like I am starting late in the game. I grew up in a typical “English” only American home. My parents are the typical mixture of various Anglo cultures and the most interesting thing I can scrounge up about my family’s background is that my grandmother on my father’s side was half Irish. Unfortunately she had schizophrenia and was never a part of my life, so other than the knowledge that I am a quarter Irish, I have no interesting heritage to speak of. In Elementary school I hated those assignments that said to talk about your family’s heritage because no one in our family can give me any specific answer. We are a little Norwegian, German, S...