My Favorite Teacher Contest

I am so proud to present the winning essay by Luciana Alves. I am so darn proud of her and all of my students for their hard work on these essays. Teaching is a wonderful career, but it can be such a thankless one as well. Ms. Godden's classes and my own tackled the Barnes and Noble My Favorite Teacher Contest out of Holyoke, MA. Luciana's essay was chosen from 85 other essays as the winner for this district. She wrote about Mr. Chotkowski, an 8th grade Modern World teacher. What's so great about this choice, is that Modern World is a brand new class this year created by Mr. C himself. If you'd like to know more, read the essay below for yourself. It's worth the few minutes this morning!

Luciana Alves

February 17, 2017

Word count: 484

The Road to Success

What is a good teacher? A good teacher looks over your work, helps you fix your errors, and helps you understand what you did wrong. A good teacher is compassionate about their work, and doesn’t complain about their profession everyday. They have amusing and appealing teaching strategies and have fun but they also get their work done and have different ways of doing it. They are creative and caring and you can always count on them. While teaching, they’ll have a good sense of humor about things and they’ll put a fun twist on learning. That teacher is Mr. Chotkowski, my Modern World teacher.

He is always energetic and in a good mood and makes the class feel alive. Even on the worst day, he brightens up the room by asking us how our weekends were or just making us laugh. He makes us feel better. In our class, we have a couple students who don’t like doing their work, but Mr. Chotkowski makes what we’re learning about fun. Like this week, we did interviews for our dream job. We were put in groups and whoever did the best gets to go in front of the whole class and get interviewed by everyone. This prepares us for upcoming jobs after college that we might get. It also prepares us for talking in front of big crowds or in an interview.

Mr. Chotkowski is strict with homework but not too strict because he’ll give us time to do it but then he tells us that in college or at your job they won’t say it’s okay that you forgot to do it. He recently taught us about autonomy and what it means to get work in on time, task, technique, and team. We got to pick our own profession or our “dream job” and he’s going to put us into groups and see how our professions work together to build or make a project. He wants to see how our professions react to time, task, technique, and team and what the outcome is and what we’ve come up with.

An exceptional teacher is reasonable about grades or homework, and takes time to help students out if they need to bring their grade up. Last week, Mr. Chotkowski said that whoever dressed up for our interviews in front of the class gets an extra ten points added to their grade so their grade will go up. Almost all of the class dressed up because he was reasonable enough to give us that option. The other day, he put us into groups based on our profession and we have to build a project that coordinates us with our professions. He gives us all of those options to have fun and be creative. Mr. Chotkowski has influenced me because he is selfless and helps kids that need it, he talks with confidence every single day, and finally you can tell from his face that he enjoys teaching with a passion!   

How you are judged:

• Compelling nature of teacher’s inspiring qualities (50%)
• Sincerity of student’s appreciation (25%)
• The quality of expression and writing (25%)