XplanaZine

[Editor’s note — We at XplanaZine recognize that the student in the wild is one of the least-studied creatures, and we feel that all would profit by listening to what they have to say about education. Today we again welcome contributor Katrina Rinaldi, a high school junior, who will share with us her point of view on what makes a good teacher.]

When Machiavelli wrote “The Prince,” he modeled it after the D’Medicis of Italy. If Machiavelli had instead written his book on teachers, he would have modeled his book after my teacher, Mrs. Harrold .

Over the years as a student I had had many different teachers to lead me through school life. Most had some redeeming quality that made them easy to learn from, or at least made their classrooms entertaining. As in most things, some teachers are better than others and some are easier to connect to than others. However, only in Mrs. Harrold have I found all of these characteristics put to good use.

The greatest characteristic of a teacher is caring. Without caring, there is no point in teaching because if you do not care about the students and whether they learn or not why should you even be teaching them to begin with? When a teacher doesn’t truly care about teaching, it is very obvious from the neglect of the students and the students’ lack of gained knowledge once the year is over.

Mrs. Harrold cared about us. It was evident the first week of class when she gave us personality tests to find out more about us personally instead of silly questionnaires to take up class time. She learned whether we were more prone to be orderly or completely random and distracted all the time. She also learned what type of learners we were, and based most of the things she did off of this knowledge. Whether you were visual, auditory, or kinesthetic, Mrs. Harrold had something for you. For the visual learners, there were PowerPoints; for the auditory learners there were her lectures over the PowerPoints; and for her kinesthetic learners, she’d make printouts of the PowerPoints for them to write on, and she kept toys for them to keep their hands busy so they would keep their attention on her. The engineering of her PowerPoints, which were sometimes sixty slides long, took a great deal of time but she did it because she cared for us and genuinely wanted us to learn what she had to teach.

Second of all, Mrs. Harrold was a tremendously dedicated person. If I happened to have an activity at school in the evenings, I would generally see Mrs. Harrold in her room grading or even sometimes helping students several hours after school had ended.

Another example of her dedication (or at least her fanatic attention to detail), would be our “Prince” journals. In her class we were required to read “The Prince” and write a dialectical journal containing two hundred entries and an essay over the book. She warned us at the beginning of the assignment that she would read over every single entry, so we had better not try to fool her or slack off.

Many of us, myself included, still thought at that time that we could fool her. On the final turn in day, my journal had two entries that had nothing at all to do with “The Prince” and everything to do with butterflies and cookies. Out of two hundred entries she found the two that were completely irrelevant and wrote a note about them on my grading sheet. It took her at least a month to get them all graded, but she read every single entry word for word. While it made for a harder class, which many of us (myself included) didn’t like, it challenged everyone to actually work for a grade for once in our lives.

Without a purpose for learning hardly any child is really motivated to learn. That is generally illustrated in many science and math classes where kids can think they shouldn’t learn the subject because they’ll never use it again in their lives. Mrs. Harrold ’s goal for the entire year was to help us pass our AP exams which could give us college credit. Nothing that we ever did was busy work. There were no stupid crosswords or silly worksheets simply to get another grade in the gradebook. We were required to remember at least sixty percent of the textbook which had thirty chapters, each chapter at least forty pages long.

Mrs. Harrold could have taken the test and made a perfect score, and she attempted to pass the knowledge down to us. She gave us printout after printout of important documents, names that we needed to know, and practice essay questions all in preparation for the test, but she made us work for the information as well. She didn’t just give us everything. We had to read the documents, we had to look up the names, and we actually had to write practice essays. Making us work for it made us learn the information better, and made us learn what type of note taking worked best for each of us, giving us skills that many have used this year in our history classes. We even had a list of about twenty dates that we had to memorize, but as long as you had the dates memorized you could jump from one to another in your head and remember the events surrounding the dates and the events in between the dates.

She taught us to think unconventionally, she taught us to learn, and she even gave us her phone number to call her if we needed her. She made us work. Her favorite saying was “If you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.” While there were times I would have sold my soul if I thought to get an A in the class (although Mrs. Harrold probably would have refused God if he told her to give someone an A they didn’t deserve), I learned from it and grew from it. Mrs. Harrold was a true teacher. Most teachers could never reach her level of dedication, her level of caring, or her ability to teach.