My MEL Experience

• Student/teacher relationships: My junior and senior year high school history teacher is someone who was very successful in keeping me interested in his class because of the relationship that he built with me. He had a great sense of humor, and was able to use it when appropriate during lecture.
• Helping students succeed: My junior year high school theology teacher is someone who showed no interest in whether or not the students in her classroom succeeded or not. For example, when having difficulty with material, she was extremely unapproachable, and not willing to further explain the material outside of the classroom.
• Hands-on: Although I have never been very interested in science, my sixth grade science teacher made our class extremely interesting. We did a trimester long project on Maine, focusing on aquatic creatures. He ended up asking the school for a grant, and he was able to put a touch tank in his classroom full of lobster, and we each raised our own lobster.
• Interest: In the two history classes that I have taken here at UMF with the same teacher, he starts every class by asking the students if they have any questions. This is how the class discussion gets started, and for the remainder of the class, it is driven by the questions that we have to ask.
• Connections: My sophomore math teacher was always very frustrating to me. I have never been strong in math class, and I was curious as to when I was going to be using certain material in the real world. So I asked this teacher, and she was never able to give me any examples of when I would use different kinds of math, and it was very frustrating and gave me no motivation to want to learn her material.