“Introducing Tyniqua Hinton”

Hello everyone, as noted I am Tyniqua HInton. This is my fourth year at City Tech, and getting to this point in my academic career has been a trying task. I started off in a remedial math class my freshman year due to the fact that I graduated high school in June 2001. So, I forgot the majority of everything I learned and was not prepared for college math courses as yet. Therefore, I was not able to begin a major in math education until I was able to complete the prerequisites required to get into the major. It took me two and a half long years before I was able to be a math major.

My first two years at City Tech was amazing, I did well in every class receiving a majority of A’s which I was invited to be in our school’s Honors Program. My favorite subjects were every history and English class I have taken, but I always looked forward to my math classes I never surpassed an opportunity to take one or attend a workshop. I learned to love math in my freshman year of high school where I had a dedicated group of teachers and a gifted tutor who taught math in the most enlightening way which gave me a new understanding an appreciation for the subject. As a result, I received a 97 on my math regents in the 11th grade, still, I felt my school failed me because they did not offer me any additional math classes that would of better prepared me for college. I never saw trigonometry until I attended a college trig class which I struggled to receive a B.  I had more  difficulty in math when I started my calculus classes which has proven to be my most challenging subjects. Even so, my passion for math has not changed, I am always willing to learn and I am looking forward to teach everything I learn about teaching middle school math to my future students. I believe  middle school is a very crucial time in a students academic career, for the reason that the students are introduced to more abstract or complicated  topics that requires a higher level of thinking and they need a teacher that is willing to understand that all students are unique and have their own way of learning so we have to add a little bit of everything to the learning experience to help develop the blossoming minds of adolescents.

I had a bad experience during my middle school year, I was introduced to the concept of the variable and my 8th grade teacher taught it in a way that was not catching for me. When we came into class all the work was previously written on the board as he proceeded to teach from the back of the classroom and spoke like the man from the popular dry eyes commercial. As a consequence I failed math the entire year, but due to the city wide exams that all New York city students are required to take I passed the eighth grade and my poor grades for that class did not leave me behind and I continued to go to high school.  Thanks to my mom who got me a brilliant tutor and all of the extra math classes my high school gave me I excelled in mathematics throughout high school. Hopefully when I graduate I could put to good use all of my past experiences along with my present ones and become an awesome teacher. Also, I ran an after school program and summer camp for the past nine years, but I resigned last August in order to finish school. Currently I became certified by the Department of Education to be a paraprofessional at New York City’s Public School, this will be helpful to me because I will learn hands on what is required to be a teacher.