Teaching Hope: Engagement

First for the section on engagement in Teaching Hope I chose the very first entry because it seemed like the editors of the book chose it to specifically hook the reader in a section dedicated to hooking and engaging students. In this section the teacher relating their experiences in the classroom nearly begins by referring to one of their students with a string of profanities. That alone immediately hooked me into the remainder of the chapter and engaged me with the rest of the stories that were told through the rest of the section. The story in itself is also a very motivational piece concerning likely the single most important part of being a teacher, genuinely caring about your students. This teacher happened to care so much that one of their students actually called them out on the unforgivable offense.

The second passage I chose, number 56 was because as I history student I often need to support every statement I make with a source that corroborates my statement. As a social studies teacher I am going to need to make it a priority to make sure my students know how to wright a well-researched and supported paper for my classes. It is also my own personal belief that to even have an opinion on any kind of topic it must be supported by some kind of evidence, scholarly, empirically, or even anecdotally, without any kind of supporting evidence we cannot be expected to have our opinions and statements taken seriously. The teacher did an excellent job fostering understanding of that idea in an especially delicate situation however, which is highly commendable and motivating to see.