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TeachersKBAY Teacher of the MonthNominate teacher for KBAY’s Teacher of the Month Click here to see who was named KBAY’s Teacher of the Month in prior months The KBAY Teacher of the Month for August is Joseph Slimak, who teaches History at Prospect High School in the Campbell Union High School District. Joseph has taught at Prospect for four years after teaching in Colorado for another four years. Joseph has studied at Colorado State University, the University of Northern Colorado and St. Paul’s Catholic College in Britain. In addition to his his BA, he holds masters degrees in Special Education and Gifted/Talented Education. Joseph will receive a Teacher Innovation Grant for his classes from the Silicon Valley Education Foundation.
When asked what he liked most about being a teacher, Joseph replied, “I most appreciate the moment of connection when students are given a new set of information and, without explicit instruction, see how it connects to their previous learning in this, or better yet another, class. There is a positive emotional moment, as well as a physiologically significant neural development, that occurs when a student successfully connects two previously disparate bits of information into a new scheme. They now begin to see a pattern not only in history but in all their learning and hopefully will want to find more information to incorporate into this mental network. This, with some luck, then helps them develop a broader and more cogent world view.”
Joseph will use his SVEF grant to purchase headphones for the computers in his classroom. “I’ve worked over the past three years to acquire enough computers to allow each pair of students to have computer access. With the headphones I can create completely independent tracks of content presentation which will allow the students to work with multimedia content at their own rate while freeing me to help develop a variety of their skills ranging from note-taking, to information selection and processing, to critical thinking.” Joseph says that the biggest challenge he faces every day in teaching is, “to engage all the students. There are always a number of students who come to the class with a background knowledge and interest in history, as well as a number of students who come with high expectations of themselves, or pressure to achieve the grade. There is another percentage, often quite significant, of students who are disinterested in learning history for either its intrinsic value, or to maintain any particular level of academic performance. In order to both accommodate and compensate for these variations in the teen mind I try to integrate media into the class on a consistent basis but with a high degree of direction (as I tell the students, we will never watch a movie, but we may study a film… the remote is your friend). Though not a panacea for the problems of the novelty-seeking brain (especially after I run out of clever jokes) it is a sight better than traditional presentation.Congratulations to Joseph Slimak, KBAY’s Teacher of the Month for August. |
