An Interview with Ms. Birch
By Alejandro Rivas
Ms. Birch's teaching career
Ms.Birch, is a U.S history teacher at Elgin High School and was born in Wurzburg, Germany. She became a U.S. History teacher because shes always loved history and likes to talk to people and engage with others.She used to live in the Dallas-Forthworth area and then moved to Austin. She teaches regular United States history as well as AP U.S History and Dual credit U.S History at ACC. Ms. Birch attended Texas Woman's University in Denton, Texas. She has a Bachelors Degree and Masters Degree in U.S. History. She also has teached at Texas Woman's University, at Tarrant County College, North Lake College and Mansfield Isd. The way Ms. birch thinks she has had a good impact on other students is that there were successful in college and some became history majors. Her number #1 skill that a teacher should have is to know her content well to be able to teach in a understandable way . Ms birch implies that when she first started teaching it was hard because she was scared and did not know what to say but as time passed by she got used to it and became easy. She has said that she would never exchange her career for another one beacause she is very dedicated and passionate about history.
Ms. Birch's classroom Observations
In Ms.Birch's classroom I observed good strategies that a teacher uses for example students work everyday in groups to do classwork and talk about things related to the subject, but in some occasions work individually. She also lets students work with one another in a assignment in the beginning of class or middle of class for a period of time. Then she gets the whole class together and picks people to share to the class. I also observed management techniques the teacher uses during class for instance, at the beginning of class she addressees the whole class of what they will be doing today. She also makes sure during the class that they are doing there work and when they are taking a test to not cheat. But she is responsible by counting the class to take roll and makes passes for students if they want to go to a place. A way I would describe her class is it looks busy every day because everybody is always working on something. The environment is a comfortable and quiet one because everybody is nice to each other and is fun to be around. There are points where it gets noisy but the teacher quiets down the class and the class is a great learning environment. Ms. Birch has taught at the College level, University level and High school level, she has teached for years and teaches regular U.S history, Ap U.S History, and Dual Credit U.S History. Ms. Birch's biggest reward from teaching is impacting others with learning and education but also with the knowledge of history.