Personal Narrative: My Experience Teaching versus Learning Essay

coda semester I led a ninth-grade class room through a reading of Romeo and Juliet. I had little time to prepare for this unit of athletic field, and had never formally studied or written about the play. I worked my centering through each scene, preparing prompts and discussions that seemed relevant to the content of the play, to its connections to private and public friendly issues (both Elizabethan and modern), and to why the play was written in poetic form, or what the poet was trying to do with language. The play is rife with paradox, oxymoron, and ambiguity, so finding a focal point or common theme to unify the unhomogeneous lessons was difficult. However, as we approached the utmost act, everything that the students and I had explored in this play seemed to me to be pointing clog to a line early in Act I, Part fools You complete non what you do.Born into a world of contradictory and opposing forces of control, authority, and handed-down obligations, a young person doe s not have the means to firebrand judgments but is swept along on the tide of what others say must be done. If ones tenderheartedness or conscience cries out for a contrary course, lack of experience and of developed judgment can be fatal. role models are required who can model the skills of unhurriedness the pros and cons, of balancing the heart and the head, of inquiring and seeking out knowledge before a final decision is made. Friar Lawrence spoke this lesson, but cryptically, through the metaphors of poison/ treat and haste/patience, yet he did not model the exercise of inquiring, balancing, and weighing before acting. It suddenly occurred to me that the wisdom that Friar Lawrence advocates but does not exactly inspire, is exactly the sort of wisdom that we were exercising in the classroom as we... ...ts enjoyment of reading and writing and also their desire to participate in language arts.Another experience confirmed my belief that learning and belief is not a one-way street in the classroom. Teachers are not the privileged literati who are desperately trying to inculcate knowledge into the nescient mass of students. Teachers need to respect the human mind in any(prenominal) stage of development and accept the fact that they can learn things from individual who is not an expert in the field. The teacher is a learner, and the students are teachers. The study of Romeo and Juliet during my student teaching experience was a collective effort to stress and interpret eternally recurring human achievements, failures, struggles, goals and desires. I learned a great deal through reading and discussing the writing of the students, and I promise that they learned something from me.