Learning Letter...

• 1.Reflect on the work you've completed in the course (book talks, mini-lessons, unit plans)
• 1. Of all the work I have completed this quarter, I appreciated the unit plan the most. I think that I also spent the most time on the unit plan as well. Time not just referring to actually completing the project but time as in researching and applying and making it meaningful to myself. I felt like completing that project I finally had learned something extremely useful in my college career. Up until this point, finals and school in general has been remotely easy, boring, and monotonous. I would complete assignments just to get them done so that I could have more time in the classroom or in the art studio producing something or being actively engaged in the career path or general “life-direction” I was pursuing. The mini-lesson and book talk were useful projects to have completed and I definitely learned more about myself as a teacher completing these assignments. I found that with the mini-lesson and book talk, I was much less concerned about the content of information that I was engaged in but the application and outcome of each. The reflection process involved with these two assignments was very useful to me because it allowed me to see how certain materials should or shouldn't be taught and how to manage the assignment(s) as I taught them. Time management while teaching is always an issue for me in the classroom. The time always seems to literally fly by. The mini-lesson was an extreme challenge for me because I am so used to writing full 50-60 minute lessons and to condense that into 20 minutes was intensely frustrating for me. I get these great ideas and have a hard time condensing them into an allotted time frame. Limits have always been an issue for me whether it be writing, teaching, size, color, etc. The blog posts allowed me to write as much as I felt I needed to without being essentially “punished” for it. In my EDUC series the last two quarters, I have kind of been the seed of a page limit joke. I would write too long of responses or essays and go into too much detail, or engage myself “too much” into the topic and OVERWRITE. I didn't know that was a real thing. The blogs were a great way to write what I was feeling and thinking without being limited on content or length and it made processing materials much easier.

• 2.     Reflect on the theories and concepts  we explored in readings and discussions
• 1.    There is one particular reference my brain goes to when I see the word theory and it isn't a very positive reference but it impacted me greatly after reading, responding, and discussing it. P. Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed is specifically what I am talking about. Reading this theory and the way students, teachers, and essentially learners were talked about, royally pissed me off. It is hard for me to really think about any other theories other this Freire’s simply because it was the one that I not only disagreed with the most, but the one that I became so emotionally involved in. I think that for the majority of the readings and reviews we blogged on, I found then useful and pulled ideas from them or simply agreed to an extent. I always tried to do three things as I read the reading. First I would look for main ideas and strategies that I would consider adding to my teaching armory. Next, I would look at my main content area, Art, and try to place theories and ideas or scenarios into an art lesson or class. And third, I would look at all the things I didn't like or found flaw, objection, or question in. This helped me to not only engage myself in the readings but to also really take different perspectives to evaluate the readings and form an educated opinion. I think the most useful discussion and blog assignment we did involved Katie Brown. I really enjoyed hearing her strategies, ideas, philosophies, and content idea exercises. I found the exercises she gave us to do with students really useful and have used several of her matching and identification strategies in different classroom activities and in EDUC 341 project.

• 3.     Reflect on how you think your participation in this course has influenced your thinking about yourself as a teacher
• 1.    I have never enjoyed listening to myself talk or talking to a class unless it is an art class really. This made the discussion part of class harder for me. I feel like I have decent ideas and process of thought but I don’t feel it is necessarily important nor do I want people to have to listen to me talk about how I think or feel regarding an issue. I think everyone has an opinion or statement to always make and early on in school I was told that people didn't come to class to listen to me talk about how I interpreted something. This being said, I see that this was wrong. There is a time and place for discussion and sharing and it holds an important purpose for the learning or not only myself but others as well. Some of my better ideas and thoughts were had after I had spent time listening to other people’s reasoning for interpreting content a certain way. Taking their thinking and adding it to my thinking helped me to analyze text, ideas, theories, and other topics on a level that was much deeper than I would have anticipated it reaching. I think after participating in discussions and learning to listen to others during these discussions taught me the importance of using discussion to teach. This, but also the importance of learning to speak, share, articulate thoughts and ideas in addition to the importance of learning to listen. Essentially, discussion has made me a more conatively aware student, teacher, and person.