My MEL Experience

• Student/Teacher Relationship:  One of my favorite classes in high school was geometry.  The teacher was extremely enthusiastic and made the classroom a safe and enjoyable place.  Mr. J knew how to get the students involved and knew how to make it interesting.  He would put a math concepts into games like baseball.  It helped us to really get into the subject.

• Learning Styles:  My history teacher did an impressive job incorporating many different types of teaching and assessment.  We did posters, presentations, movies and of course normal tests.  It made for an interesting class where I learned a lot more than I would have thought possible.

• Helping Students Succeed:  Ms. Johnson was one who really pushed us to believe that we could do anything that we believed we could do.  She had high expectations for our class but she pushed us to learn more in the limited time that we had together.  The class was an advanced placement class so she expected us to write very well.  We rose up to the challenge and ended up doing better than I ever had in an English class.

• Autonomy:  One of the best English classes I ever had was my senior year.  We were allowed to decide when and what we were going to read.  Of course we had certain guidelines, but we were able to decide in what direction we were going to lead the class.  It created interest in the subject and helped us to enjoy the subject.

• Hands-on:  My physics class consisted of almost all hands-on learning.  We took the concepts that we talked about in class and experimented with it in the labs.  It made the concepts easier to comprehend.  I'm a visual person, so it helped me out a lot to see the things in a three dimensional world not just a two dimensional.