So, at the risk of leaving out more than I say, this is me:
This photo was taken during my last year of graduate school while I was directing my MFA production of Romeo and Juliet (with an all-male cast). Since graduating, I've worked for three different theatre companies, briefly started my own, moved from one coast to the other, got engaged, worked retail, substituted, got married, moved three times, started work on a teaching credential, and finally, had a baby. Phew. Been a busy six years.
I decided I wanted to teach when I was in high school. I was dead set on being a history professor like my grandfather. Once I got into college, I changed my mind and studied theatre. I bounced around for a while, but I always came back to teaching as the thing I wanted to do. After being out of grad school for a while, and having applied for quite a few college teaching jobs only to be turned down every time, I gave up on my dream. Once I started substituting and got into the classroom, I remembered why I wanted to teach so much. The more I substituted for high school, the more I came to love working with teenagers. After a long-term sub job working with 11th graders, I knew it was time to get a teaching credential and continue working with high school students. For me, my path has always been leading me to teaching. No matter how hard I tried, I was never meant to do anything else.
How did your personality affect your choice of content area?
Whenever I take any sort of personality test, my results tend to be all over the map. And depending on the test format, my results vary. The first version of the test had me as ESFJ:
And the second had me as ESTJ:
Extraverted (E) 71% Introverted (I) 29%
Sensing (S) 64% Intuitive (N) 36%
Thinking (T) 60% Feeling (F) 40%
Judging (J) 59% Perceiving (P) 41%
None of those results are massive swings on either side. What this tells me is that my personality tends in a direction, but it's very easy for me to see (and sometimes experience) the other options. I think this is why I enjoy the study of English. I love books. I love to see the world through someone else's eyes, to experience their story.
However, if you look at my profile as concrete, I really should be teaching math or science; subjects where there is one right answer or one correct way of doing things. But I love English. I love that, given enough space, we can justify any position using only our words. And I'm about to move into things to do with students, so...
How does or will your personality affect your relationships with your students?
I love being able to tell my students that, when working with concepts like rhetoric and argument, there are no wrong answers. If you have the idea, can find evidence for it, and back it up with reasoning, then it's correct. It doesn't matter if it's the answer I would have come up with. This confuses many students and they feel lost at first, but watching them learn how to justify their position on any issue through what we learn in class is such a pleasure.
Right, back to my personality type. Being extroverted, I love being around people, so my time in the classroom (most days) energizes me. There are days when I feel like I'm teaching into a vacuum that are less than great, but mostly I love interacting with people all day. And fortunately, because I am fairly balanced, I have the ability to relate to most of my students.
How will your teaching and learning style affect your teaching and your students' abilities to be successful?
I am definitely and aural learner. This is consistent with what the learning style test told me. According to that test, I am conclusively and Active learning, marginally an Intuitive learning (note that this is opposite of my Myers-Briggs profile), a Verbal learner, and a Global learner (again note that this is the opposite result). The part of this that affects my teaching most is the verbal part. I like to talk to my students. I have to work really hard to accommodate other learning styles and teach to them. I suppose it's lucky that I already know this about myself, but knowing doesn't make it any easier to actually fix in practice. I have to work really hard when lesson planning to vary up my teaching style and make sure I'm not just talking at the students all the time. It's a constant struggle.
Below is my teaching profile. I will tell you that I honestly have no idea what these results mean. I would seem to pull my style from every category, but I don't really know what the categories mean, how they interact, or if this is a good or bad thing. I'll leave the results here and let you be the judge.
expert | formalauthority | personalmodel | facilitator | delegator |
So that's me. Or at least the teacher-y bit of me.
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