After a variety of jobs relating to teaching, Andrew Levin is finally taking on the challenge of teaching teenagers this year here at Grayslake North.
Mr. Levin is an algebra and government teacher. He worked as an educator for a long time, but he wanted to do more with his career. So, he worked and went to school again to get his teaching license, and once he did, he decided he wanted to teach kids in middle schools and high schools.
“I started as an educator back in 2012 actually teaching community college. Eventually, I realized I really loved teaching, but I couldn’t find a full-time position on the college level, so I started to think, ‘If I like teaching, and where I was at didn’t really have that potential, how could I improve my lot?’ So I ended up getting my teaching license, and this is my third year teaching on the secondary level, which means middle school and high school,” Levin said.
Since he worked in college, Mr. Levin has created teaching methods and different ways of acting toward students, and the way he does this is through reflection on different events. If something didn’t go too well, he could take it and turn it around to be something good. If it went well, he could turn it into something even better than it was. He has developed that skill over his years of teaching, and it still applies to his job to this day.
“I reflect a lot on what I teach my students. When I make lesson plans, like documents on what I’m doing every day, I have a column called notes. So after sessions that go particularly well or particularly poorly, I write notes on what I did that went well or didn’t go well, and I think to how I can improve it.”
Mr. Levin is big on interacting with his students. He tries to have some kind of rapport with each of his students, and he tries to understand everyone better that way. He has some goofy ways of trying for these friendships, like how he dresses. He wears interesting clothes to get people’s attention, and sometimes they can talk about them as a subject just to begin talking in class. This idea and way of trying to connect with his students helped him to build friendships with them, which allowed for a better time teaching for him and a better time learning for the students.
“The better rapport you have with your students, the more likely something’s going to switch. I literally try every day to have some type of article of clothing that’s at least somewhat interesting. Some of my students will almost every day mention how they really like my shirt. I have a five dollar fish shirt I wear some days. I have pink pants. I have these cool socks which are called Freddy Krueger socks by some of my students. I want them to have something to make them know that when they walk into class, they think ‘Oh, it’s Mr. Levin’s class, it’s going to be okay’,” Levin said.