Every Blue Day morning, juniors and seniors in General Psychology students stream into Hana Chen’s room 702 eager to engage in a new fun project and learn about topics ranging from mental health to the reasons for human personality differences.
Her favorite part about teaching the class is the freedom to learn through fun activities and experiments. Her class never has homework, but students complete projects and classwork. Some of the projects include presentations on ethical and unethical psychological experiments and making a soundtrack of your life.
The soundtrack of your life project, done in the second semester involves creating a soundtrack with songs that showcase eight major events in a student’s life that shaped their personality.
“Music is something that can reflect or influence our personality or state of mind,” Chen said. “Oftentimes we hear a song and it can bring us right back to a moment in time. The project challenges students to reflect on big or small moments in time from their lives so far and what song connects to those moments.”
Not only did it allow her to learn about her students through music, but also got them to open up about stories from their lives.
One of Chen’s General Psychology students, incoming senior Lavanya Bose, said she enjoys the real-life connections to the units, such as how personal characteristics can relate to real-life situations.
“Chen is able to put complex topics into very easy terms to teach us,” Bose said. “She’s able to give us many examples and visuals that connect to the units we’re learning.”
It is students like Bose who Chen says make her decision to teach worth it. Despite Chen’s initial major in political science at the University of Rochester, she decided to get a teaching credential. She received her master’s in secondary education from the University of Albany.
Chen has taught here for the last eight of her 18 years of teaching. Previously, she taught at Leadership Public Schools in San Jose and Shenendehowa High in Upstate New York.
Although Chen never specifically requested to teach General Psychology when receiving her job here, there was an open slot needing to be filled, so she happily stepped up.
Chen emphasizes that this class is a general course, not an AP course. Although she follows the same unit guide, they do not go as in-depth as an AP class would — for example, her class does not cover statistical analysis.
Chen said she considers one of her biggest achievements to be exposing her students to a different subfield of social science that most do not have as much experience in.
“Showing them how psychology can connect to their interests is my favorite,” Chen said. “When I tell kids who are interested in sports that there is a field called sports psychology, I find students who are interested in pursuing careers in psychology.”
