My MEL experiences

Student/Teacher relationships: When I was in the 7th grade I had a homeroom/english teacher who was able to really connect with every student in the class. She was a hard teacher yet still made it fun for us to be in class. As middle school students we no longer wanted to be treated as little kids and she treated us all as adults. Because she was treating us like adults she expected us to act like adults and it created a mutual feeling of respect. I looked forward to going to her class and loved the way she communicated with us.
Learning Styles: The learning styles that I enjoy the most are when we get to do hands on work in class. I hate when teachers simply lecture and expect us to take notes for an hour of class. In high school my geometry teacher Ms. Cheevers knew that math wasn't my strongest subject and so she gave us the choice of doing hands on projects such as creating diagrams so we could do group work and see first hand how different mathematical formulas worked. I was able to understand so much more about geometric shapes that way and it made the class that much more interesting to me.
Interest: I disliked many classes throughout high school. I felt as though some teachers just did not understand how to make class interesting and relate it to us students. Economics does not interest me one bit and my teacher in high school just played boring videos and had us write down notes class after class. I can't remember one thing that I learned in that class and I did my homework just so I could get a good grade. I didn't enjoy one thing we learned and feel as though my teacher could have put in a better effort to make it interesting. That's the most important part of a teachers job is to make a lesson interesting yet effective at the same time.
Helping students succeed: Chemistry was probably the hardest class I have ever taken. I would study for hours on end and still fail each and every test. I enjoyed doing the labs which we were assigned but when it came to taking the tests I just could not get a decent grade. I went to see my teacher, Mr Cole for help often and it just didn't seem to help. By the end of the semester I had a D+ in the class. My teacher pulled me aside and told me that he was going to give me a C for all the effort I had put it. He knew how hard I had worked all semester and that I really was trying to learn the information. It really made me feel that all my hard work had paid off and that my teacher really did want to see me do well and although my test scores were a D average the effort I put in for the class did not reflect the same score.
Hands On- One of my favorite classes in high school was photography. My teacher allowed us to go out and take our own pictures where ever we wanted. We weren't limited to what we took pictures of. What was even better was that we got to learn hands on how to develop our own photos. We were in the "black room" for just about all of class and each student put together their own photo album. It made us appreciate the pictures that we had taken because not only were they are own but we also developed them ourselves. I learned so much throughout that class and really gained an appreciation for photographers and it was all because the whole class was hands on.