While I am not really interested in being a formal K-12 educator (i.e. a teacher in a classroom), I am really interested in informal education (i.e. museum programming, after-school time) and potentially teaching in institutions of higher education. Because my focus is more outside of the formal teaching realm that has more limitations due to standards and policies of public education, I have a wider view of what I believe teaching should look like or focus on. One of these views is that I believe that education should always be fun and relate to the learner’s own life, regardless of the context that one is learning in. I have many pre-college educational experiences that also reflect the experiences I have had in college in engaging in similar practices including volunteering at the Children’s Museum of Houston, being a Camp CAMP volunteer, and being an observer at the Jan and Dan Neurological Institute and a veterinary clinic as a praxis experience at my high school. One of my biggest takeaways from all of these experiences is the importance of having hands on experiential learning in order to get a good grasp on different concepts. Although not necessarily fully necessary at all times and within every lesson, they are incredibly useful in order to see how your own formal learning can be reflected in your life or future. For example, in my pre-med track high school, we were required to attend weekly observations of different medical related professions that interested us. Among other placements, I chose to observe a research lab and a veterinary clinic because they were the areas I was most interested at the time (See Images). Being able to learn through observation and see where the learning in the classroom could be implemented in a potential future profession was incredibly helpful for me in not only reinforcing the content I had already learned, but also allowing me to think about myself within these professions and ways to navigate my future.

       

Other pre-college educational experiences that I have have informed how I plan to teach including the AP classes and testing that I took in high school, my 12 years of Chinese school, and my occasional attendance in elementary schools in Taiwan. What ties these experiences together is their heavy workload, their long lectures, and the model of teaching following the banking model of education, where students have to memorize what is lectured to them by the teacher. While I was able to do well in these courses through intense memorization either over long periods of time or immediately before a test, I never fully learned anything to the point where I could still talk about it today or apply it elsewhere, nor was I ever able to completely see the relevance of the learning I was doing in class outside of these potential classes counting for college credit or my resume. I think it is really important to move away from this model of learning because of the importance of being able to learn concepts and take the learning with you in the long term, which is heavily related to being able to see how learning relates to your own life or future. Furthermore, while lectures can be helpful for students, completely lecture based classes or classes styled only to pass rigorous exams like the APs are not as useful to the student even if they test well because the learning does not stay after testing and often times there is no learning beyond memorization. Because of these experiences, I believe places of education should have hands-on experiences, relate learning to the learner’s own life or future, and engage students on a deeper level beyond memorizing content. While I have come to these conclusions through my experiences, there are many other educators who have also reflected on student narratives with similar experiences who have also explored these topics further whom I will reflect upon later in other sections of this portfolio.