My MEL Experiences

• Student/teacher relationship: Junior year of high school i was in an AP English class. The teacher I had was Mr. Wells. He was excited about English and writing, he was funny and very positive. The class was very discussion based and in the past I had found difficult to share in the discussion because my teachers would ignore my hand in the air. Previous teachers were tired of me doing most of the discussion so they would refuse to call on me. It made me feel like an outsider and I eventually stopped bothering to participate. Mr. Wells made me excited to get involved again and made the other students feel the same way so I didn't feel ignored or too smart.
• Autonomy: In the same English class as before all of the topics for our papers were decided by ourselves. The teacher gave us a topic but we had to pick exactly what we would write about. For example, the last paper of the year was on love and I decided to write my paper arguing that it is possible to fall in love more than once. I based it mostly on my own experiences since my mom and dad are divorced and remarried, and my grandmother has remarried after the death of my grandfather 19 years ago. I argued that seeing them find love again proves to me that it is possible. It was easier to write papers for this English class because I was able to find something interesting about each topic to write about and therefore, make it relevant to me.
• Avoid Rewards: Throughout high school I took Spanish and all four years I had the same teacher. Her way of motivating us to participate in her very wacky class skits was by giving us stickers after. We ended up competing to see who could get the most stickers on their binder before the year was over. I think that some rewards are just fun and silly enough that it makes students want to participate. After all, they were just stickers and we could have bought them at the dollar store. I could see why other types of rewards would be a bad idea though. They would get so used to getting rewarded they would expect it every time.
• Helping Students Succeed: A big part of this one is having high expectations for students. My director for all of my high school plays probably had the highest expectations for me in school. As the four years went by and I got more and more involved in the theater I found that I got even more challenging roles. I always rose to the challenge of doing my best in these roles because I knew I was expected to. It was expected that I would have my lines memorized first, that I would know my character inside out and that i would deliver on the night of performance. My most challenging role was probably as Maggie in Act 3 Scene 5. I had to play the part opposite my younger brother. There was a fake kissing scene that looked very real offstage.
• Hands On: I actually really hated these things in school. They involved getting up and moving. Also, they usually happened in science class and were called labs. I am really bad at labs. I follow the directions completely and still manage to somehow do very poorly. All of my friends loved them though so they helped me not fail science by helping me with the labs and I put the readings in language they could understand and helped them do the equations. I really don't know why the hands on activities are so hard for me.