Week 1 Blog Entry

I think that our own experiences with learning language arts have a big effect on our ideas on teaching and learning. Typically people enjoy things more that they are good at and don't enjoy things as much that they aren't as good at. Therefore, it is likely that someone who really enjoyed language arts in school would put more of a focus on it when teaching it because they may think that others will enjoy it that much as well. I think this is a really important thing to think about, though, because not all students enjoy the same things, so it is important that the teacher does not let his or her beliefs interfere too much with their teaching. For example, I have had teachers before that push what they like or what they specialize in onto the rest of the class and EVERYTHING we did in the class related in some way to the topic that the professor was an expert in. In my opinion, that is not giving students the well-rounded knowledge that is crucial to their development. For me personally, even though I really enjoy language arts because it comes easier to me than other subjects, I will try very hard not to push that on my students because not all people share the same feelings that I do about the subject. For the question regarding our learning community, I am a little unsure of what the question is asking, but I am going to assume that it means the learning community that we have in our TE 402 classroom. Our learning community is composed of all people that have a desire to teach younger children and even though we are very different in age, each of us has something valuable to contribute to our colleagues. In our learning community of TE 402 we are very diverse even though it may not seem like it at a glance. Even though we are all in the Elementary Ed. program at MSU, we have all had different experiences that brought us to where we are today. For example, for some of our colleagues, this is their second degree. For others, they are starting a family or have their own family already. Others are married. Others come from another country. Even more general, we are diverse in what we want to teach and how we learn ourselves.