If you are a teacher, are you sometimes proud of your students?

[Blackmail!]

And if you think the answer is positive, tell us why, and what kind of relationship and teaching technique you built with them... What is your style of teaching, for instance? And how do you think your students react to it?

If I'm opening this thread, it's also because some of my Moroccan architecture students (Casablanca) have just won an international competition in sustainable design -for students-, and my class received the 1st prize, just before the MIT (Massachussetts Institute of Technology), with Polytechnikum Zürich (ETH) being third.

So yes, I'm incredibly proud of them, I'm proud to have worked with them and witness the result.

In France, some of my former students already won a few national prizes (2009 and 2010), but they were never distinguished like that.

 

[cafe]

Gratz!

 

[Blackmail!]

Here are the results:

http://www.holcimfoundation.org/T1683/Student_Poster_Competition.htm

I worked with the three teams of Moroccan students (EAC), and was their teacher in sustainable construction and design (precisely!) when they decided to join this competition.

They received their prize in Mumbai (India), just two weeks ago.

 

[ygolo]

Congratulations!!

But, who is gonna follow that?

Perhaps, I will lower the bar a lot.

I'm just a Teaching Assistant. I've been somewhat proud when a student actually catches a subtle error I make (I mean more than typos). I also like it when it is clear that the students are understanding what we are teaching them. A couple of my students really impressed the professor last quarter. One of them got a near perfect score on an a final exam that I think most people (even those who supposedly studied thermodynamics) would have failed miserably. What is funny is that she was one of the people who says she struggles with mathematics and was surprised to find physical chemistry to be one of her easier courses that quarter.

 

[FemMecha]

I tend to be proud of all of my students. I have one developmentally delayed adult female student who began with limited motor control of her hands, but I've given her exercises each week and now she can play the piano with each finger individually. I wasn't sure if she had the neuromuscular hardware to develop, but she does, so that breakthrough based on an experimental approach on my part made me feel really proud of her.

I also have some very gifted students and last year a 10-year old girl won second place in an international composition competition. Her musical expression has surprising emotional depth.

At the school where I teach I have learned a great deal about the plasticity of potential. Our director can spot and train children into being prodigies who play the most advanced piano music by around age 12. Each human being possesses far more potential than we realize, but our limitations have to do with time, energy, self-esteem, and other limiting factors. I find it helps to be proud of a student before they achieve, and then they often develop into the level of expectation you demonstrate to them.

 

[Ivy]

Congratulations to your students! What an honor.

When I was a teacher I was proud of my students a lot. Not because of what I gave them but what I saw them claim for themselves. It was cool to witness. I was a 1:1 tutor, though, so it was never a matter of teaching them the material- just reinforcing what they learned from their regular teachers, helping them grasp concepts and tackle assignments, and helping them get organized so they could better access their education. Working with a child who starts out being frustrated by their own tendency to be scattered/disorganized, and seeing them when everything crystallizes and they grasp the "big picture" of something, is a real treat. But I didn't credit myself with anything but facilitating, or drawing out what they had inside them all the time. As a teacher to my own children now, I feel the same way.

 

[OrangeAppled]

Yes, congratz!

I used to substitute teach & was mainly doing glorified babysitting. But I also did private tutoring, which was much more like teaching. I was definitely proud of my students when I'd see them fulfill the potential I saw in them & was trying to nurture in them. I feel like as a teacher, I was mostly helping students to get past mental hurdles (ranging from feeling incompetent, to dislike of a subject, to being arrogant & not checking for mistakes, etc); and a big way to do that was to help them see the potential they have if they get past those hurdles & the potential learning something has to get them where they want to go. At the very least, they'd plow through it successfully, and at best, they'd actually enjoy the process.

 

[skylights]

Wow, ditto everyone, congratulations.

I used to work as a tutor and what I was most proud of was when students connected with their inner motivation and overcame their mental struggles to achieve their goals. Sometimes it was just helping an international student work his way through prepositions, but other times it was getting a morose greasy-looking freshman to actually care about what he was writing. That was always my goal - to get them in touch with their own caring. It set me on fire to see them light up when they suddenly got in touch with motivation. Like prodding a candle until it bursts into flame.