Ben Schell
LaRue County
LaRue County High School
The ability to effectively relate to and then motivate a group of children is a trait that is definitely learned through experience. I was blessed with many wonderful opportunities to provide mentorship to younger children from a very early age. As the son of a military father, my family moved around quite a bit during the early years of my life. We spent time in Germany, Alabama, and Hawaii before establishing permanent residence in Kentucky. At each stop, my mother would facilitate a babysitting co-op with other military families in the neighborhood. Growing up, we would have as many as 8-10 children under the age of five in our house throughout the week. I always jumped at the chance to work with these children. My mother always had a plan for each day, detailing what she wanted each child to accomplish, and I was able to her carry out this plan. This ignited the education fire within me at a young age.
Students do not always enter my classroom with a love for social studies. I strive each day to relate various aspects of government, economics, geography, and United States history to students who, sometimes, do not realize the importance of these topics. Any chance I get, I try to provide relevant, real-life connections to what we are studying. One example is during a yearly unit on the United States Constitution and the Amendments, when I have students choose an amendment that applies most in their life and then defend their position. The go-to answer is almost always the freedom of speech, but through a thorough study of all 27 amendments, students are able to realize the importance of other protections built into our Constitution. This relationship between a document written over 230 years ago and what is currently happening in students’ lives is paramount to the structures I have built into my classroom.
It is cliche to say that without teachers, we would not have any other professions; however, I am a firm believer that there is no other profession in the world that allows a person to impact as many people as teaching does. That impact is an absolute factor in my path to teaching. Currently in my 24th year of teaching, I know that I have had well over two thousand students enter my classroom at some point. In that time, I know I was able to impact every one of those students in some way, and I hope the impact I had on the majority of them helped to instill a true love and passion for learning.
