Blog Post #9

Mr. Joe McClung has wrote a blog after his years of teaching. He writes a new post every year after the last day and discusses what he has learned from that year of teaching. I read His blog post from his Fourth year and his Third year.

In his third year post he tells us that he learned to remember and know who your boss is. He says that it is very important to remember the reason that we started teaching, and that was the children. He explains that his students are his primary focus and that's how every teacher should be. "Don't Touch the Keyboard". I think there is a very important message in the paragraphs below that header. When you are being trained to do something the best way to do it is to simply, just do it. He tells us that the studets WILL struggle and you should, as a teacher, have them work it out and not take over their problem for them. McClung says that it's okay to be an "outsider" in the teaching world. He is an outsider at his school and clearly does not care what his peer teachers care about him. He is close to his students and cares more about his relationships with the students and if they are enjoying class. He isn't afraid to do things differently and eat lunch with his students instead of in the teacher's lounge.



In his fourth year post McClung was a lot shorter than his other blogs. He gets straight to his two main points. His first one is "You Gotta Dance with Who You Came to the Dance With." He reiterates that you should not care about what your peer teachers believe or what they thinks about you. He says he got himself that far and he wasn't going to change because the teachers looked at him differently. The only people you should care about are your superiors and the kids that you are teaching.
His second point he made was "Challenge Yourself". This paragraph hit home with me. In my high-school most of my teachers my senior year were on their last year of teaching and became pretty comfortable with the material they were teaching. They didn't do anything but talk to us for about 30 minutes of the class, tell us to read independently, and we'd take quizzes on the material. They didn't make my senior year classes, such as government and economics, exciting so it was brutal to sit through. He tells us that we can't get comfortable with teaching the same subject over and over. He tells us to challenge ourselves. His goal is to ensure his students enjoy class and not resent school like he did as a child.