Throughout the course of the semester, we have researched, learned, and practiced many different teaching strategies that will help diversify our teaching when we are in our own classrooms. Different teaching strategies help to switch up the way our classroom works. Many of these strategies are to help our students understand the information we give them easier and to allow them to work with us to learn in an easier and more efficient way. Not only have we learned about different ways to teaching students, but also different ways we can make learning easier for them. The extensive research and information we read about over this semester that explains how students learn and how many students are not comprehending the information they are learning because of some problem is astounding. In my blog post, “Help for Struggling Readers”, I read and discussed Chapter 11 of subjects matter, which looks into struggling readers and how we as teachers can get students more interested and help them be more successful in their reading motivation. Although that chapter included many different approaches to help struggling readers in the classroom, I found one approach to be more interesting to me than the others. The approach that I thought was interesting was proposed by Lisa MacArtney in her classroom. She had the students fill out a profile that helped her define the various types of intelligence found in her students. The four types were, “students who are strong on social relationships, those who are well organized, those who are analytical, and those with high energy,” (Daniels and Zemelman, p. 282). By filling these profiles out, MacArtney is able to analyze the different types of students in her class, and then group them based on their strengths. By doing this, she is automatically helping her students succeed in group work as well as boost their confidence in their own skill. 
Not only did this semester equip me with some necessary tools for teaching a middle school classroom, but it also pushed me to improve my skill of researching as well. Through resource blogs, I am now able to properly search for helpful math/teaching websites that I can use at will in my classroom. And through this research, I found some very helpful websites that can help me in my teaching as well as provide entertaining learning for my students. One article I came across in my search that I thought was interesting and helpful was titled, “We should Teach Math Like it’s a Language”. This article pushed my idea about math and the relationship it can have with a student. In the article, the author Jeannine Diddle Uzzi compares learning math to learning Latin. She talked about the idea that math builds on itself, and goes on to explain why this is one of the reasons why students have such a hard time with math. The negative stigma with math can also be traced back to our education system. One problem that fosters more negative ideas about math is that “instead of encouraging them to start anew in order to reinforce their skills, we test them, label that review ‘remedial,’ and withhold college credit from them,” (Uzzi, 2018). Uzzi goes on in the article about the importance of higher education math classes. This article was very helpful for me, though, because it pushed the limits of my idea on math and how it should be taught.
Our job is a very tedious one. It requires many different elements of teaching that all take time and practice to use effectively. But without the right tools, you will not be able to get the job done. This class over the course of the semester has given me the proper tools to do my job as a teacher effectively as well as given me the opportunity to research tool myself that I can apply to my classroom. There are no two teachers with the exact same teaching strategies, and that is something I really look forward to as I become a teacher myself. The information I have received from researching and practicing will allow me to have my own twist on my classroom and help me to adjust to the different types of students that I will have over the course of (hopefully) many years.
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