Joseph

Certified Tutor

I am applying for Touro College and their Graduate Program for Education because I found my calling. I want to teach the next generations about history and discuss why history is important in every aspect of the world. I have had great professors and teachers who pushed me to my limits and because of that I wrote a sixty-page thesis for my senior history class (History 425: Research Methods). My thesis, Our Thing: Traditions of the Italian Mafia, examines primary and secondary sources about the Italian Mafia. I used both autobiographies from Mafia leaders and a detailed an organized interview I conducted with a citizen of Little Italy, Manhattan who lived there for seventy-nine years. I have done thorough research into the topic of Italian Organized Crime, studying the first arrival of Italian immigrants.
My other research topics include, ancient Roman warfare and the Golden Age of Piracy. I have been reading, researching and analyzing ancient Roman warfare for more than five years and the Golden Age of Piracy is my most recent topic, researching for the past six months. With the help of Professor Kavey (His 240) and Professor De Lorenzi (His 205, His 300, and His 425), from John Jay College, I can comprehend and conduct proper research from both primary and secondary sources. Both professors taught me how to analyze data for proper research and taught me how to apply it towards writing a proper research paper. I am using the tools they taught me, along with every other professor I have had, in my further research topics.
I have decided to take my ambitions further than my Undergraduate and go for my Graduate degree with the hopes of becoming a history teacher. I have been watching, learning and absorbing the lessons my professors, both good and bad, gave me as a student. I had great professors at John Jay College and I learned more than just the class lessons. I will try to replicate and, if need be, adapt those lessons to my future students. With the help from Touro and their education program, I am hoping that the lessons I learned from my professors and the classes from Touro, I can become an effective teacher.
As you should be able to tell, my career goal is to become a history teacher. I want to teach children and kids of any age the significance that history is trying to tell us. I want to show that by studying history, we can learn about how traditions, cultures and other behaviors have been created, changed and adapted trying to understand how they are now. My main objectives are simple; I want to become an effective teacher. I want to become a teacher that my students respect and truthfully enjoy to be in my class. In my opinion, being a teacher should be just that. Teachers should be like doctors with medicine and medical treatments where the patients are the top priority, but for teachers the students are the top priority. Education is an incredible and large factor for a child to become successful in the world, not by their salary but education increases their intelligence in all aspects of life, not only in school.