Hey everybody!
My name is Kevin Powers, and I currently teach 8th grade ELA at the middle school I once attended as a student--Clinton Middle School in Clinton, Tennessee. I just entered my 10th year as an educator, and I love it more and more each year.
Ninety-nine percent of my teaching experience has been at the middle school level, and I'm finding more and more out about that with each passing school year.
Now, to dig in to my own experience as a student... I start here because I believe, above all, that teachers ARE simply students. I learn as much from my kids as they learn from me. I think of Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed in which he works with two pedagogical methods. The "banking" or teacher-centered method of just filling students with information, and the "problem-posing" or student-centered method, where everyone is a learner and a teacher in the classroom.
My educational experience was balanced, I'd say. I've had some truly engaging, "problem-posing" teachers in my time. I've had some truly dull "banking" types. As a student, I could find value in both with an obvious greater connection to the "problem-posing" types. My favorite teachers challenged me, let's say, both personally and intellectually. I most often resisted lazy teachers, those who sort of just doled out work and sat behind their desk. I was inspired to be an English teacher my sophomore year in high school. Mr. Oliver simply did things differently. He made his English real. He connected it to the outside world. This speaks Freire's assertion that "problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality." Precisely. The discussions I had in sophomore English felt like that. In the same way, as a teacher myself, this is why I crave participation from my students in class discussion. It "unveils" more for me than I can ever plan on, and I love the surprises that result from it.
The conundrum of middle school is that we often believe our students can't handle the freedom to think and wonder aloud, to discover their own learning or even learning style. I aim to meet them where they are and help them come up above water.
My wife of five years and I had our first baby in June 2018. He is a beautiful, healthy baby boy named Kit. We have two cats and love to travel, mostly to Major League Baseball parks. As of now, we have visited 17 of the 30. I love reading (of course), seeing as many movies as possible (I also run a sort-of-dead-at-the-moment movie blog and have reviewed movies for both print and online publications), and playing live trivia with my work crew on Wednesday nights.
Ninety-nine percent of my teaching experience has been at the middle school level, and I'm finding more and more out about that with each passing school year.
Now, to dig in to my own experience as a student... I start here because I believe, above all, that teachers ARE simply students. I learn as much from my kids as they learn from me. I think of Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed in which he works with two pedagogical methods. The "banking" or teacher-centered method of just filling students with information, and the "problem-posing" or student-centered method, where everyone is a learner and a teacher in the classroom.
My educational experience was balanced, I'd say. I've had some truly engaging, "problem-posing" teachers in my time. I've had some truly dull "banking" types. As a student, I could find value in both with an obvious greater connection to the "problem-posing" types. My favorite teachers challenged me, let's say, both personally and intellectually. I most often resisted lazy teachers, those who sort of just doled out work and sat behind their desk. I was inspired to be an English teacher my sophomore year in high school. Mr. Oliver simply did things differently. He made his English real. He connected it to the outside world. This speaks Freire's assertion that "problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality." Precisely. The discussions I had in sophomore English felt like that. In the same way, as a teacher myself, this is why I crave participation from my students in class discussion. It "unveils" more for me than I can ever plan on, and I love the surprises that result from it.
The conundrum of middle school is that we often believe our students can't handle the freedom to think and wonder aloud, to discover their own learning or even learning style. I aim to meet them where they are and help them come up above water.
My wife of five years and I had our first baby in June 2018. He is a beautiful, healthy baby boy named Kit. We have two cats and love to travel, mostly to Major League Baseball parks. As of now, we have visited 17 of the 30. I love reading (of course), seeing as many movies as possible (I also run a sort-of-dead-at-the-moment movie blog and have reviewed movies for both print and online publications), and playing live trivia with my work crew on Wednesday nights.
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