Introducing[Mei][Zhu]

Yet, the summer ended. We are back in class, and my head and mind reset in motion and gear up to get in motion. I still have so many things to learn to improve myself to be a well- prepared person with critical thinking about teaching.

I come from China. Chinese is first my language, and I also speak some proper Spanish. I was grown up in a small town, and my family lived in a small place in a small town. Life was hard; public education was not accessible for every children because the cost was too high. Especially, my family, me and my two sisters, it was very difficult to pay for the tuition and all expense. My parents had to work very hard to support us to stay in school.

Now in America, as an immigrant, language was my first priority problem when I came here. English was difficult for me to transfer my thoughts clearly as I wanted to. After ten days’ going back and forth to the Department of Education and high school, I began my first day in American high school. Fort Hamilton High School – the most beautiful and advanced one that I had never seen in my hometown. I was excited about everything surround me especially the people who speak American English. The supervisor of the Language Department arranged me in an ESL class. I felt comfortable when I saw Chinese in the class.

When I was little girl, I used to dreamed to be a police woman many times, also a supermarket owner, a lawyer, etc. As time passed by, when my headmaster in high school asked me what I want to be in the future, I answered that I wanted to be a dedicated person that can contribute to the society. Gradually, I found the dream being a police woman fades out. And the dream to be a teacher is taking place.

I chose to be Mathematics teaching because I realized that learning Mathematics can be productive if we learn by hands-on approaches with open minds. It is not about reading and doing homework assignments, which is not enough for learning Mathematics.

I love the MEDU 1021 class very much. Before I entered this class, I did not know that teaching has so much fun by hands-on activities. That was a Mathematics class but more about how to teach and learn mathematics by working together. We worked on the problems in groups and then shared with the whole class; we learned by group discussions. We listened and gave feedback to other peers; we learned by critical listening and thinking. We presented our topics and responses to “students”; we learned by actual practice ourselves as future teachers. In this class, each of us learned at the same pace because the content knowledge is within our pre-knowledge. We learned more from ourselves as we made progress. The least I love about Mathematics is rote memorization of formulas because I think that is the most difficult part for me to learn something new.

I learned Maple to compute and graph in Borough of Manhattan Community College. Also, I learned some basic coding in R in the summer’s Mathematics research from Prof. Bessonov. In this class, I want to learn some software that are being widely used in secondly schools. I have seen a teacher in City Poly High School who used her cell phone to scan students’ answers and presented the bar chart in the class. I believe that must be a new program because my teachers from high school never taught class that way.

In CityTech I have learned many requirements and internships which will help me to succeed my dream of teaching profession, and school has opened many doors to many programs such as Peer leading, Noyce, CSTEP, PERC, I will need the school to assist me in my future plan that I wish to be a teacher after graduated from here. At the same time I will continue to pursue my Master degree in teaching. I will need a lot of help and guidance here in CityTech. Shortly, I want to pass the required certificate tests before completing my Bachelor’s degree. Besides learning, I also love swimming even though I just learned how to swim this summer. I found it very interesting and healthy.