Week 1 blog entry

My personal experiences in Language Arts have a direct influence on my teaching ideas. I have had really positive experiences in Language Arts throughout my schooling and I think that has built my confidence a lot. Also I have been in LA classes that are very organized, structured as well as free writing classes so have seen that LA can be taught in various ways. 

I found that I do better in classes where I can integrate personal thoughts and experiences into my writing. For example when reading a book in high school we had to compare an event in the story to an even in our own lives. We then had to write about how the events were similar, how we handled the event compared to the character. I remember loving this project because it was personalized. As an educator, this is a great way to see what the student took away from the book, test their comprehension skills, as well as make the student think deeper and relate the story to an outside source. I want to be able to do this in my classroom and I think it can be done at all levels of teaching. Students love to tell stories and allowing them to personalize work I think will make them put more effort and time into their final project. 

I really did not like multiple choice questions about a book. I always found when I knew i was going to have a quiz over a book or a multiple choice test I read differently because I was scared to miss details. I often ended up missing major points because I was too worried about what color hair the main character had. I also prefer deadlines. I hated being handed a book and having to have the entire thing done by a certain date. I'm a slow reader as well as a procrastinator so the combination always landed me in trouble. When I need students to have a book read, I will give them mini deadlines to keep them on track.

As far as our learning community, I think we have very diverse learners. We have students in our classroom who are all striving to be teachers, but at different levels and are specializing in different subject areas. Also, we have students who came from large school in GR and Detroit area and students who came from small local schools. We saw from the first day drawings that we have learners who love to travel, read, play sports, listen to music etc. Interests affect how we will run our classrooms and it is great to be able to have a community of diverse learners and share ideas!