end of the year

As we get to the end of the year I was thinking about what we have talked about throughout the year. This class has really got me thinking about issues that I am going to face as a teacher and it only gets me more excitied to go out and teach. The problems that you face teaching are going to be tough, but if you can work through them and succeed it will be unbelievable. Teaching is something that I have been around my whole life being in a family where the majority of my families are in educaiton in someway. I am really excitied to join them in the education field and learn and grow as a teacher because of them. Overall, this class has just reminded me why I want to teach and I am really glad that happened.

Rachel Vaghts chapel

The other day I went to chapel and I heard Rachel Vaghts speak. I went on the spring break mission trip with her and became good friends with her so I was excited to hear her speak. She is an excellent public speaker. She relates to the crowd really well, her talk was just the right length, she is funny and she had a really good message. Those are four qualities that teachers need to have when teaching in order to get through to their students. In her message she was speaking mainly to the seniors, but it really struck me too. She spoke about how once she got back from our mission trip she just wanted to go back right away, she also spoke of how when she was done with college that she just wanted to stay and not go out in the real world. This was actually something that I was thinking about. I have been having so much fun in school that I was beginning to think I just wanted to stay in school forever, but then Rachel got to the end of her talk. In the end, she talked about how we need to leave and we cannot stay in school forever, what we need to do is go out into the world and do our mission in life. My mission in life is to teach and I am excited to go out and do it.

Speaker at the Middle school

When we went to the middle school it was very interesting to see what the lady had to say. I was really amazed with what alcohol can do to kids brains when they are not fully developed. It can really cause them to lose intelligence and it also causes them to have a much higher risk of becoming an alcoholic. As for her speaking style I found it to be very interesting. She was really hyper and almost a little crazy with the way she talked to her computer. She did however bring a strong message to the table in a way that didn't boar you to death. She kept you laughing and just wondering what she was going to do next. I really enjoyed her as a speaker, as well as her message.

strengths and weaknesses

In teaching I feel that my strengths are being able to communicate with people. All of the good teachers I have had were really good and getting their points across to the students and I feel that is a very important aspect of teaching. You have to communicate what you want from your students in their work as well as behavior. Another area I feel like I am strong in is just my people skills in general. I get along with people for the most part and I rarely have conflicts with people. I feel like when I become a teacher I will be able to make strong connections with my students, this is another quality that the strong teachers I have had, have shown in their teaching skills. One area were the best teachers have been strong in where I tend to struggle in is in organization. I struggle in keeping everything clean and in order. It is something that I will need to work on a lot in during my teaching career, if I want to be a very successful teacher.

Blog #7

In class last week we did the group/team building project. I think that the project was really helpful. It made me look at how in schools we need to teach kids how to work with other people, becausre it is a skill that they will need for the rest of their life. While it is important to put kids in groups to develop their social skills, it is also important for the assignment they are working on to work on together to be a constructive project. If you just throw kids in a group and give them an assignment that is worthless they aren't going to be able to work on their group skills and they won't get anything out of the assignment so it is important that when you make group assignments that you work hard to put together an assignment that the kids will get something out of it in the group sense and the subject they are working on.

Chalk and wire

I didn't stay for the chalk and wire presentation, because I already had it during my J-Term class. From what I remember about it, the program seems to be a really good system for helping students put together an impressive portfolio. With the way the economy is today, people need every advantage they can get in the job market. I think that this electronic portfolio really puts Luther students at an advantage. Plus the fact that we begin working on it so soon really helps us out, because then we just don't put together a quick portfolio it is something we have put much time and effort into, it is something we can be proud of.

Blog #5

Over Easter break, my aunt who is a 3rd grade teacher brought up a good point when I was telling her what we were talking about in my Ed class. She was talking about how her ed teachers didn't really ever teach her anything really valuable for when she was actually in the classroom. I told her in this class I really feel like the teacher does a good job relating classes to things that will come up in the classroom. One thing she told me, she wished she would have had someone talk to her about is how to deal with tough parents. I though to myself, that is a good point, because during my J-term class, my teacher had to deal with his share of angry parents. I think this would be a good topic to discuss in class because it is something every teacher will have to deal with. I'm not sure that there is a perfect answer, but it would be nice to talk about some ways to deal with it. One thing she told me is to remember that you are the teacher and stick strong to your beliefs as a teacher, another thing would be to be consistent with all the parents, just like you try to be with your students.

chalk

After watching the first part of Chalk, it honestly reminded me of my mom's side of the family. Her side is made of almost all teachers and educators. I have grown up listening to them talk about many of the topics that arrived during the movie. I really would like them all to watch the movie, they would love the movie.
The thing I want to focus on today is the history teacher Mr. Lowery, the one who had a very difficult time at first getting across to the students, mostly on a level of control and he was extremely nervous in front of his classroom. Kids can see that fear so easily and they love to take advantage of push over teacher. He was a first year teacher though and that year always the toughest year for all teachers. My cousin right now is in the first year of teaching and I know he will be a great teacher, but he has had some tough times in his first year and that is always to be expected. That is true with all jobs I feel like, but especially with teaching just because you are in charge of so many kids right away. I am looking forward to teaching very much, but that first year is going to be kind of scary, but just like Mr. Lowery who seems to relax and become a much better teacher I'm sure I will be fine.

3/2/09 Lecture

This blog is about Mr. Chambliss and his talk to us on March 2. He talked about many things, one thing that caught my attention was when he talked about how you shouldn't stay in one place and do the same thing your whole career. I understand what he is saying, you should challenge yourself and try to advance as far as you can if that is your mindset. He said you would have a tough time being an effective teacher if you just stay in the same spot. I found that to be false because in high school I had three teachers who had taught at my high school for 30+ years and one of them for 40+ years. Those three teachers were three of the teachers who had the biggest impact on me as a student and were teachers who made me realize that I really did want to become a teacher. They might have been a little predictable, but they really got their points across and were excited to be teaching and were passionate about what they taught. That might not be the right path for me, but it was for them. So I understand that you could get a little bored at one place and might need a change of place to help you out, but if the person is passionate and enjoys where they are I see no problem with someone staying put their whole career.

Gardner's eight frames of mind

In this blog I wanted to talk about Gardner's eight frames of mind. The eight different frames are: verbal, mathmatical, Spatial, Bodily-kinesthetic, musical, intrapersonal and naturalist. This is a very good example of the different types of skills different people have. All of these different types of mind frames are very important to everyday life. We need people of each different mind frame to make our world make. We need people with good verbal skills to help communicate with each other, we need people with good naturalist skills so we know how to take of the environament, and grow our food.
Each one of these is very important to our world. It is important that we have this diversity in our world, but it is also one thing that makes teaching a very tough job. Because every one is different we cannot teach everyone the same. So as teachers we will have to learn to teach to these different mind frames in order to be successful. This makes things challenging for teachers, but I also think that this is one thing that makes teaching fun because you get to interact with all different types of kids and that keeps things interesting when teaching.

Blog #1

My first blog is about the film paper clips. In the movie the kids of small town Tennessee have the idea to collect paper clips for each Jew who was killed in the Holocaust. Soon word spreads about what they are doing and they end up with 24 million paper clips. So they collected well over the amount of Jews and all other persecuted people killed in the Holocaust. They make a monument with an old railroad car and the paper clips.
This was a very unique idea that this school came up with. It was really a great way for the kids to get some hands on learning experience while learning some valuable information at the same time. This was a great way for the kids to see what six million looks like and how big of a number that really is. Once the kids built the monument and were the people giving the tours of the place, I feel that really showed what they had learned in this long process of collecting paper clips. They didn't just collect paper clips they learned in a very powerful way what happened in the Holocaust and what a horrible thing it was.