• Welcome
  • Welcome
• Background
  • Why Teaching?
  • Teaching Philosophy: College Not a Goal but a Fact
  • Professional and Educational Background
• Experiences in Education
  • Introduction
  • Breakthrough Collaborative Sacramento
  • A Better Chance Program
  • Boston Collegiate Charter School
• Academic Work at Hamilton College
  • Introduction
  • Mathematics Major
  • Hispanic Studies Minor
• Educations Studies at Hamilton College
  • Introduction
  • Issues in Education
  • Curriculum and Decision Making
  • Ethnography and the Learning Enviornment
  • Education Practicum
• Resources
  • Inspriring Instruction and Pedagogical Techniques
  • Bibliography

Introduction

Since I have known I have wanted to be a teacher starting freshman year of high school I have had the ability to use every opportunity to do something with teaching. The first student-teaching experience I had was working with Breakthrough Collaborative Sacramento. Breakthrough is a nationwide program that provides rising 7th and 8th graders with a summer school opportunity to prepare them for the year ahead. These students are mainly from under-resourced schools and low socioeconomic backgrounds. Once I got to college I wanted to continue working with students from low-income backgrounds, which is why I work with A Better Chance program. A Better Chance program pulls students from inner-city areas and puts them into school districts such as Clinton Central School District. This program provides these students with a better opportunity to strive for a higher education. Lastly, over this past summer I interned with Boston Collegiate Charter School (BCCS) located in Dorchester, MA. BCCS is a charter school that accepts students through the lottery system, which makes for a diverse group of students from all different areas of Boston and different cultural backgrounds.

It is clear that I have focused my educational experiences around students who are from low-resource areas and low socioeconomic backgrounds. I believe that these students need passionate teachers and strong mentors in their lives because they are usually the ones that are not provided that at home. As I emphasize in my teaching philosophy, for me teaching is only part of the job and mentoring students is the other major part.

In the following sections I highlight a few of my achievements or articles of work that I completed during my experiences mention above. In the Breakthrough Collaborative section I have links to my first lesson plan and a lesson plan further along in my teaching experience. I hope this shows the growth I made within two summers of teaching. The A Better Chance Program section focuses on the tools I have used in becoming a better tutor, such as links to websites about differentiated instruction and the helpful skills to better this type of instruction. Lastly, the section on Boston Collegiate Charter School includes a video of my teaching an entire lesson on graphing quadratic inequalities and a lesson plan that I created for the course. All of these artifacts helped propel me to becoming a better teacher.