Real Teachers Reflection

My Reflection of Real Talk for Real Teachers Real Talk for Real Teachers written by Rafe Esquith has been thought provoking as well as entertaining to read. I have learned a great deal from reading this book and I hope to implement a few of his ways in my future classroom. I can relate too many of the stories that have been told in this book because this is real life in a school environment. I would like to break my summary down chapter by chapter.
Chapter One –Badlands (7-15)
Esquith states that he offers “sugarcoated advice” (7) to new teachers but he really wants new teachers to know is that there will be bad days. This chapter has a couple of different little stories but the one that I can relate to the most is about the boy, Eddie that wanted to join the acting club. He wanted to join after the others had already started but Esquith

Teaching the students self-control is important and takes time. Students will make mistakes but teaches need to make the mistake a learning tool by teaching the students a better way to conduct themselves. He writes “When we are unreasonable with students and humiliate them into submission, the benefit is really for the teacher and not the students”, this really hit home for me, I have seen that happen and the student shut down and he had a miserable rest of his year. We need to instill confidence in our students not talk poorly to them.
Chapter Five-The Quiet Man (76-89)
As I was reading this I was thinking that it was written just for me. In the past I was the kind of person that had something to say about everything. I am working on this and reading this chapter made the point even clearer to me. Teacher or anybody for that matter need to listen more and talk less. When we as teachers start getting frustrated we should stop and think about the frustrations the students are going through and make those teachable moments.
Chapter Six- 19th Nervous Breakdown