Paper #2 Rough Draft

Paper#2- Compare and Contrast Teachers

My two favorite teachers are Mrs. Kragen and Mrs. Gibbons who were my 6^th grade AGATE English and Social Studies and my 9^th grade Honors World History teacher, respectively. Mrs. Kragen is a professional editor and she taught AGATE classes, which are advanced classes. Mrs. Gibbons was working on her PhD during my freshman year and she got it about halfway through the school year. They were both great teachers and everyone loved their classes. I believe that the most important role a teacher can play is that of a mentor and both Mrs. Kragen and Mrs. Gibbons did a great job of this.

Both of the teachers are highly educated which made them good teachers and mentors. Mrs. Kragen is a professional editor, so she would strictly grade any writing assignments we turned in. Once a month she would assign a book report that would be specifically on something like the plot or the theme of the book. For every grammatical error we would lose points, and if we changed tense during the paper, then she would take 2% off the final grade each time we changed tense. She did this so that we would organize our thoughts better. Mrs. Kragen would also assign 10 sentences a week on one type of writing composition; for example sentences that use prepositional phrases. She assigned the sentences so that we would learn how to correctly use different compositions of writing.

Mrs. Gibbons earned her PhD halfway through the school year, so she had the college experience fresh in her mind which allowed her to better prepare us for college. The textbook that she used for our class was a college level book. It was to get us used to reading at a college level and understanding the information that we read. Mrs. Gibbons would take time and show us how to take really good notes and how to figure out what the most important information from reading is. The notes that she taught are called Cornell Notes and they have been proven to help students remember the information. The Cornell Notes require you to read the text once, and then read it again while taking notes. Then you have to write questions based on the information in your notes.This allows you to quickly review the notes just by answering the questions.

They both tried to improve our core life skills; Mrs. Kragen focused more one middle school and high school skills while Mrs. Gibbons focused on college skills and skills that you would use in a job. Mrs. Kragen would always assign challenging work which would require us to go more in-depth on the topic and we would learn more about it. She had everyone in the class participate in something called National History Day. For National History Day everyone was split into small groups of two or three and then had to pick an important person to research from the past century. We then had a couple months to research the person and would eventually write a paper and create a poster board exhibit on the person. A couple groups from our class made it to the regional finals and one group made it to state. We learned good research skills and how to work in a small group.

Mrs. Gibbons assigned a lot of power point presentations. This was to improve our communication and presentation skills. The first assignment that she gave was a power point, she wrote down notes on what we were doing and then gave us tips on how to improve. The final for her class was also a power point on a civilization that we had been studying for the whole year; after we finished with that she showed us her notes on how our presentation skills had improved through out the year. She would also have an after school club twice a week where you could go and do your homework or get help from a tutor. This helped set a schedule for getting your work done on time.

Both of them genuinely wanted their students to learn, and they would try and make the lessons more fun so that we would be more willing to learn. They also enjoyed teaching and I think that it makes a big difference whether a teacher enjoys teaching or doesn't. In 6^th grade we had a big unit on Ancient Greece and Mrs. Kragen split our class into four Greek city states. We then had our own version of the Olympic Games and a quiz bowl, the winners were given extra credit points. We had learn about the Olympics and study the Greek for he quiz bowl, but it was in a more fun setting. For the final project our class was split into two groups. Each group had to create a civilization centered around one belief- such as brawn over brain or just something like bacon. We had to meet the major criteria for a civilization and every criteria had to have something to do with the central belief. Then we had to create clues for out language and beliefs and stuff and give them to the other team. The other team would then be playing the role of an archaeologist and would try to figure out everything about our civilization. This project was fun and required a lot of creativity while also teaching us about the basics of civilizations.

Mrs. Gibbons would try to make some of the lessons more interesting. She would try to give work that included some of our interests; for example we had to write a paper on a famous murderer. Mr. Gibbons would also talk about her life and her family. It did not always have something to do with the lesson, but it was interesting and helped her to keep the class's attention. She had two Honors World History classes and our class was about half the size of the other class, so we would finished our work and presentations earlier. Because she was working on her PhD, she knew how important it was to take breaks from the work so she would let us have a little party once in while and watch a movie that had to do with what we were studying; for example we watched Gladiator after we finished our unit on Rome.

While Mrs. Kragen and Mrs. Gibbons are both great examples of teachers playing the role of a mentor, they do have some differences in their teaching styles and what they focus on. The differences in their teachings styles helps to show what they wanted to prepare the students for. Mrs.Kragen would stay more focused on the details for the assignments and the skills that we would need in our near future while Mrs. Gibbons tried to improve our skills that we would need for jobs and tried to give us the tools to easily understand information. They are two of my favorite teachers and I had a lot of fun and learned a lot in heir classes. They were both highly educated and genuinely enjoyed teaching which led to the classes enjoying their class more and learning more in the class. Both Mrs. Kragen and Mrs. Gibbons played what I believe is the most important role of a teacher which is to be a mentor.