"I was a teacher for over twelve years, and I still am, even though my title has changed and I have an administrative position. I would like to continue teaching in some capacity, as it is a practice with which I'd like to keep up; moreover, my methods are unique, as I focus on effective questioning that leads students through the appropriate thought processes that develop their skills in terms of reading, reading comprehension, writing, etc.

I am very familiar with New Jersey State Learning standards for language arts, as well as many other subjects, and have been able to successfully develop lessons around the higher order critical thinking skills that those standards aim to develop. If applied correctly, even the more rudimentary concepts, through effective questioning and focus on said skills, have higher order thinking implications. As a teacher, my duty is not to merely provide students with the answers, but rather to teach them how to arrive at reasonable conclusions about , and make sense of, the material with which they are working.

During my years teaching high school and adults, I have given my students practical advice to hone their skills, with a keen focus on vocabulary development. Even in subjects like mathematics, which many would view as divorced from language arts, having an extensive vocabulary in integral to students success in solving problems, as math involves highly specialized language to describe empirical phenomenon. In other words, students need to understand the problem being described before they can solve the problem, which is one of the purposes of mathematics. Purpose is another thing that I emphasize in all subjects, and one of the most basic purposes of education is to teach students how to effectively communicate complex ideas. This is a shared purpose among all content areas, and the fact that my lessons are guided by this purpose is what makes them stellar and comprehensive: not just doing work for the sake of doing work." less...