Ms. Oliver is a grade 8 science and language teacher on the fifth floor of Immaculata high school. She’s been teaching grade 8 for three years now. She teaches in the fifth floor lab and occupies herself with plants and of course her students. 

 

Starting her day at 6:00 sometimes 5:30 Ms. Oliver works out and gets ready for the day. She says that with young kids the only time to get things done is in the morning. She’s often the one of the first people at school, usually arriving at school at around 7:00 around the time Mr. Garnett arrives. She spends her time at the school before students arrive preparing material and lessons for the day ahead. 

 

Although Ms. Oliver loves being a teacher now it didn't always used to be that way originally she wanted to be a physiatrist. She says that teaching was almost a family legacy with so many family members being teachers. Yet after becoming a language tutor she fell in love with being a teacher,  being in schools and spending time with kids. 

 

What does her day look like 

Ms’s favorite part of teaching is the students and making special connections with them. In fact that's what drew her into teaching, while tutoring she fell in love with teaching and interacting with students. She finds that each bond with a student is different and unique making each student special. 

 

Basesing most of her unique teaching style on what she learned while teaching kindergarten. Ms. Oliver  draws inspiration from the play based learning and interactive teaching that is common in kindergarten. She uses self regulation as a primary element to her teaching making it a part of the day to day learning material in her class room. What's most unique about Ms. Oliver's teaching methods are how she teaches language to students, in particular french. After becoming a DELF examiner who works with the French testing for grade 12’s she often found that french teachers focus too much on the reading and writing aspect of the french language and believes that the main focus of the language curriculum should be listening and communication. Ms. Oliver noticed that the French being taught was not helpful or practical and most students ended up not being fluent in French. She also believes that speaking and listening are much more helpful skills in the real world where you will use French for practical things. 

 

When it comes to Ms. Oliver and handling disinterested or problem students she believes that if the student truly doesn't want to learn then there's nothing you can do to force them. Despite that she believes that if you want to encourage a student to learn you have to build a rapport with and make connections between the learning material and their interest. She also uses a method she learned while teaching kindergarten, called learning prompts. This tactic for engaging students is basically putting out a variety of material and lessons for the students to grab on to and take interest. The hope of this tactic is draw a student in with an interesting lesson of teaching and get them hooked and engaged, as well as hopefully building a stronger rapport with them. 

 

We all hate when we are forced to learn a subject that just seems to have no value or purpose, it feels like you're wasting your life on a pointless subject that doesn't even make any sense. Well it turns out that Ms. Oliver feels the same, that's why science is her favorite subject to teach. She says it has a purpose and can easily connect to other subjects such as Geography, Math and language. It's because of this that she often blends her language and science class together to make the course more interactive and applicable to the real world with real life scenarios and examples

 

By the end of this article I hope you learned something new about Ms. Oliver. If you liked this article then make sure to check for the next teacher spotlight.