This past semester and school year I volunteered at the Central Florida Leadership Academy. This is a charter school about 20 minutes away towards down town Orlando. The school contained both middle school and high school students. I chose to complete my service with a high school math teacher because that is what I plan to teach in the future. The teacher that I helped out in the classroom was a fairly new teacher herself, it was only her second year teaching. Some of my time there did include grading papers, but my favorite thing to do while in the classroom was going around and helping students with their questions.
One of the most rewarding things for me as becoming a teacher is to be able to help someone understand something they once couldn’t. The school I volunteered at was a title one school and it’s students seemed to be behind in academics. I loved being able to go into this classroom of struggling students and help them look at math a different way. I feel like I really made a difference in some of those students lives, even if that just means they know and understand how to do one more math problem. With that being said, I learned a lot from this experience.
Unfortunately, the reason I learned so many things was because I saw a lot of flaws and mistakes with the teacher I volunteered with that I would correct. One of the main things my teacher lacked was organizational and planning skills. While I do understand why these skills were so low, she was the only math teacher for the entire high school section of the school, that doesn’t mean that she shouldn’t make the time to create proper lesson plans for her classroom. She often just taught straight from the textbook instead of creating fun and enjoyable lesson plans for students. I feel like this really hurt herself as a teacher, but especially hurt and impacted her students. Math is a difficult subject for many students so I have learned from her to take the time to plan out interesting and engaging lesson plans.
What could have improved my experience is being more active in the classroom. If I was able to, I would go around helping the students every day to help improve their understanding of math. Unfortunately, I had to do what the teacher wanted me to, and that involved just sitting there and grading papers at times. I feel like the students really liked when I was able to help teach them, they seemed like they understood the material a lot more.
Just being able to hear and see something be taught two different ways can be extremely helpful for many students because not everyone learns the same way. This is also something that LEAD has shown me and that I will hopefully incorporate into my future classroom. This is also another thing I have learned from my experience is to try to teach the same material in different ways in hope that more students will grasp the subject more easily.
This was overall a great experience. I learned many things about being a teacher and gained a rewarding feeling from completing service. I love that I was able to help out in a title one school and help improve student’s ability to learn and understand math. For my future service I will continue to spend it in the school systems helping students with math. I will probably choose a different school to volunteer at for next year just so I get experience from multiple types of schools and students. This volunteer experience gave me the opportunity to learn as a teacher and to also serve in my community and I hope to continue this throughout my years at UCF.
