Emily Sivak

Where are you teaching? What subjects and grades?
After graduating from Slippery Rock in 2015, I went to the PERC job fair with the goal of getting a teaching job and just hoping it would be somewhere warmer than Pennsylvania…fast-forward a few months and I was hired to teach at WR Odell Primary in Concord, North Carolina. This is my second year teaching and I have the pleasure of teaching all subjects to my favorite grade—second grade!   

 

       What advice would you give to current students who are enrolled in the teacher preparation program?

My biggest piece of advice would be to take advantage of every opportunity.

·      Learn as much as you can and build relationships—Professors who were role models in college will become a valuable network to you even after you get that diploma. It’s nice having those same mentors just a quick email, text, or Facebook message away from advice even in my post-grad career. The Slippery Rock community is a wonderful one!

·      Get as involved as you can—as cliché as this piece of advice seems, it is also the most important! Joining an education club (such as NSTA, NCTE, ECE, Kappa Delta Pi, etc.) is one of the best ways to get experiences teaching in a variety of settings (at museums, on campus, in classrooms, afterschool programs, “fun days” and so much more!) and they could lead to campus leadership positions which will later become great resume builders.  

·      Take risks—This program is the time to figure out not just how to teach, but what your personal teaching style is. Take chances in your field placements with creative lessons. Go the extra mile, always. Maybe even get out of your comfort zone and try an experience teaching abroad! I spent a spring break in Sweden and student taught in Mexico. While both were definitely out of my comfort zone, these were among the best experiences I had at SRU -- and both had tremendous effects on my teaching skills and confidence.

 

     What is one positive experience that you have had with a student?

My favorite moments of teaching so far have been the ones in which a student completely lights up in disbelief and says “Wow! Learning this is fun!” Just this past month it has happened several times---A struggling student who hates reading told me our daily interventions were the “best part of her day”; hard-to-motivate students were shining and persevering through a Mayflower engineering project—hardly realizing they were putting to good use all the math skills they had been learning; and a research project on animal life cycles had students begging for more time because they just wanted to learn more. No matter how stressed I am as a teacher, those positive experiences are the moments that I strive for in my classroom. I believe that every day should be one where learning is fun!

 

    What makes a great teacher?

I believe you need patience, passion, and determination to be a great teacher. The reality is that teaching is a hard profession which requires lots of hours in and out of the classroom. To be successful in this field is to be fully invested in your students. From the time they walk in the doors to the time they get on their buses, students crave challenges, need to be supported, want to be loved, and are ready to learn. There are only a certain amount of hours in a school day, so it’s up to the teacher to give their all to those kiddos each and every day. Simply put, every day as a teacher will have it's own unique challenges and opportunities...and that means every day is an opportunity for students (and their teachers!) to learn and grow and to become better than they were yesterday!