I have said many times over the last couple of weeks that if I had jumped back into school to pursue this teaching thing without of having taken this class, I would have quit after a quarter, maybe two. I'm not a huge fan of school. I don't like having to sit in a classroom for years until I can get to where I want to be. A lot of it is straight-up pride. I feel like I could teach anything (I really can't, but I feel that way). Most of it, though, is I am just anxious to be out there, doing something real. This preparation stuff isn't always fun. It is necessary though.
This class has reinforced why I want to teach, who I want to teach, and, especially, what I want to teach. This class alone will be enough to push me through the next few years until I am able to be in a classroom. Why? Because I learned a lot about who I am as a person/educator.
With the book talk, I got to speak about a series I highly enjoy reading. It let me explain a little bit about myself while passing on information that hopefully my classmates can use in the future. In the mini-lesson, I learned more about who I was as an educator. I saw a few places that I excelled and, more importantly, I felt sincere joy in creating and teaching the lesson. The unit plan, although a huge drain on my energy stores, was the combination of the two. I was able to take a novel and genre I truly love and use that passion to create a series of lessons that I hope to one day teach. These things have instilled in me the desire to continue. These things alone would have pushed me on.
Luckily, the theories on education we discussed were present, too. They have helped me put words to my thoughts on education and let me know that I was not wrong in how I taught. The first few weeks of class only gave me more and more excitement about teaching and more and more anticipation. Discussion-based teaching is how I have always attempted to teach in my previous opportunities, but I never knew why. It was how I enjoyed learning, it made sense to have students give their own answers. How else would they make the knowledge their own? The reading concerning that theory, though, gave me the words and the confidence to continue that style of teaching.
