Carlos Ramirez

May 27, 2020

HIST 4330
Teaching Philosophy
Since I was in high school, I knew I wanted to pursue a career in teaching. Little did I
know that I was going to end up studying to become a History/ Social Studies teacher, as my
original plan was to become a Band Director. Since I was in the sixth grade, Band was a very
important part in my life, and the thing that would keep me very busy throughout my entire High
School career, with football games, band contests, rehearsals, etc. While Band was very
important to me, I thought that Music was the career that I wanted to pursue. Unfortunately,
things did not go as planned, and by my second year in college, I figured out that Music was not
really the career that I wanted to pursue. Even since I was a kid, I’ve always loved Social
Studies/ History, and as I wanted to keep pursuing a career in teaching, I decided that I wanted to
become a History teacher instead. And as time has been passing, especially in these last few
semesters, I have come to love my major more, especially now that I’m almost done with my
career. I feel that I have made the right choice to switching to History.
I would like to become a teacher because I feel that I could contribute to helping create
better citizens and a good generation for this nation by teaching. I value education a lot as I feel
that education is the path to living a successful life. By educating either middle schoolers or high
schoolers in a couple of years from now properly could help them prepare themselves for
college, a proper education could create excellent engineers, doctors, teachers, lawyers, just to
name a few, and being able to help create successful individuals for the future will leave me a
feeling of satisfaction, especially if I witness their success myself.
My goal is to teach at the middle school or high school level in a couple of more years,
and my favorite district to be able to teach at in the future is Socorro ISD, especially since it is
the district that I have graduated at, the district where I have done my observation hours for
teaching, and finally because of the quality of the district. I have been told, though, that school
districts like San Elizario ISD, and Fabens ISD are districts where the education is really not at
its best, and that the pay in those districts is good, I would also love to teach in one of those
districts, if possible, even start my teaching career in one of those districts, I feel that one of
those districts would challenge me more, and in a way, help me become a better teacher.
Something that I would like my students to gain in the future is for them to realize that
History/ Social Studies is just as important as Math, English, or Science, and that it can be a very
interesting subject if it is taught to them in the right and proper way. Unfortunately, History in
classrooms is not taught in the correct way, the way that History is designed in classrooms makes
History boring to many students, which at the end of the day, makes these students choose
History as their least favorite subject. History is designed to make students pass a standardized
state exam, and the way the material is approached to them is by making them read from a long
textbook that contains irrelevant information, and making them memorize dates, people, places
etc. And while this is important, at the same time I feel that students should be able to think how
events in history can relate to current events, why certain events really happened, in other words,
make the students think more critically instead of just memorizing facts.
While I do not to seek to make History students’ favorite subject in school, I would at
least seek to make History more interesting for these students. Different methods I would like to
implement in my classroom is to have my students watch videos, explore different primary or
secondary sources, have them pretend they are creating a Twitter post related to the event they
are studying, quiz them on Kahoot for example, or have class discussions or debates in possible.
With these methods, I would like to make learning History for my students as fun and interesting
as possible.