Tim Brown

InTASC 9 – Professional Growth

5/11/19

Through my time at Fallston and Edgewood, not only have my abilities as a teacher

grown, but my perspective on life itself has changed greatly. One of the most essential parts of

growing as a teacher is understanding the vast differences of students and how to work with

those to still reach your end goal. The two polar opposite placements have each taught me

important lessons about how many different things are happening under the surface of our

students that directly reflects their experience in the classroom. For example, during my time at

Edgewood, I had a student take a phone call in the middle of a lesson. I addressed what I thought

was just wildly disrespectful behavior and came to find this student was the emergency contact

for her younger brother and needed to take the call to ensure he was okay. Or while I was at

Fallston, I had a student that seemingly didn’t care about anything having to do with school or

learning. I later learned that it was because he was essentially abandoned by his birth father and

since then, had witnessed several people close to him take their own lives. We only see such a

small portion of what our students are experiencing on the surface and it is important to keep in

mind that often, school is just one more thing to add to an already overwhelming amount of

responsibility that our students are having to take on. Without the exposure to the variety of

situations our students are in, instructors tend to become complacent and begin to lose their

empathy. That is another key aspect to my development as a professional: empathy. Seeing how

all different types of students deal with the difficulties of life while going through school has

prepared me to deal with an myriad of situations that I will encounter in my classroom.