Blog Post 9

When I was young, the creative side of my brain developed faster than the side that wanted to read or do math. I struggled with reading for a long time, and my teachers always placed me in special reading groups, which were humiliating, and the teachers there were not very kind or helpful. I mostly just felt unwanted and stupid. One of the teachers I had later on believed in me. She helped me learn to read and I have loved to read ever since. 

As I have tried to figure out what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to study in school, I thought about the experiences I had as a young girl, and it ignited a fire inside of me to be a teacher and to help kids who struggle with reading. All it took for me was someone believing in me and exhibiting endless patience. I never wanted to be a teacher, but it looks like I changed my mind. 

I have loved the Service Learning because it has allowed me to get some first hand experience with students, and it has helped me decide whether or not teaching is actually something I want to do. It was a lot harder than I expected it to be. In my mind, all the students listened to me and they learned and it was great. That's not what my actual experience was like, especially in the classes with Special Ed kids, and those are the ones I was hoping to teach when I become a teacher. They don't listen, and they don't cooperate, and they don't learn, but it was an incredible experience. I do think that I will keep going in this direction and become a teacher, and hopefully one day I will be able to make a difference and help to change a student's life the way my teacher once changed mine. 

As I have been learning in my education class, I have become aware of a lot of different teaching methods and techniques that are used by teachers in my service learning classrooms. It has actually been really cool to make those connections, and it helps reenforce the fact that the things I am learning are relevant and applied. 

And I think think that I have definitely been able to apply the lessons I have learned in the classroom when I have been helping. 

I think a lot of the time, there is a lot that we learn that don't even notice we are learning until we get prompted to think about it. I have liked writing a blog post to make connections between what I learn and what I see, and that has been awesome. 

I don't know if I can say I see growth in my blog posts from the beginning to the end, but I can definitely say that my learning has grown from the first time I posted, when didn't know much about teaching or education, but I know a lot more now and I feel a lot more comfortable with the classroom setting than I ever did before, and I feel more comfortable around students as well. 

Blog Post 7

I have found it really interesting to learn about the standards in the schools, and what is and isn't required for students to lean. It's interesting to see how kids in the classroom obviously enjoy learning some subjects above others, and they are very clearly happy about learning one thing, and very clearly annoyed by having to learn another. When I was in 1st grade, I loved to do the art and craft part of class, but when it came to reading time, I hated it because I couldn't read very well. I can see that in some of the students in the classroom. Students develop skills at different times, even though they are, for the most part, learning the same material. It's a little hard to see what is and isn't taught as much because the students go to different classrooms to learn different things, and I can only go to one at a time, but for the most part, it seems that everything we learned about in this lesson as being a requirement, is being covered very well in the classroom.