Whoop! There it is.

It’s so bittersweet typing up this reflection on the 332 class this semester. I’ve truly enjoyed the class time that we have all shared together. I’ve met people and connected with other future teachers on such a surreal level, it’s hard to say goodbye to the class. I feel like when people told me in high school that college is going to be a massive collaboration of brilliant human beings and magnificent ideas they were lying to me until this point. Until now college has really been just a glorified high school. I’m not sure if this being my first semester at Chico State is the reason, or if this class is the reason (let’s say it was all this class), but I’m so happy that I can be around people that I met in this class until I graduate.

 

This may seem weird, and Kim, I don’t want you to take this in a bad way, but I didn’t realize I was learning until about the last few weeks of class when it all started to come together. It was hard for me to grasp the message of the dense articles we read as a class. Once we started collaborating with each other and doing the article groups and the Ignite talks, I really started connecting all the dots and seeing the bigger picture.

Literacy is not just reading Shakespeare and being able to write a research paper on Hamlet. Literacy is texting your friends- “Yo bff, where u @” and emailing your instructor- “Dr. Jaxon, my sincerest apologies on my absence from last class.Literacy is playing Portal until 3 am on a school night, all to realize that the cake is a lie! Literacy is playing Skyrim and discovering a whole new world, with new missions, and creating a new race.

Literacy can be so much more than what the standards make students think literacy is. The current system we teach students with in public schools is one based on failure, not success. When we try and mold all to fit into one definition of abilities, it’s only natural that there will be failure. One of the biggest realizations of the semester for me was about second language English speakers. It baffles me that a student that is learning English as their second language is deemed less literate, or sometimes even illiterate, than another student whose only language is English. That’s something that needs to change.

 

Being a future teacher, I want intertwine technology with my lessons. If we have a project where they could make a PowerPoint or a poster board, I’ll have them create a movie trailer, or a website. I’d get all my students on a Google Doc to submit rough drafts, so they can ask me any question at any time and I have more access to them.

A question I’m still trying to process, would I let my students use phones in class? Who knows. Maybe I’ll experiment when I actually am a teacher.

 

As far as my internship went at PHS, I learned so much about classroom dynamics and classroom diversity. It was great to have a female mentor, she was able to point out to me when a high school male was trying to challenge her authority, she was open about how she deals with all issues. I learned about socioeconomic classes, and how they affect kids. But most importantly I learned that I LOVE KIDS. I love the high school age too, people told me I was crazy for wanting to teach these kids, that it’s too late in the game to try and get through to them. Maybe I am crazy for wanting to teach them, even after seeing how the classroom dynamics are in my internship. But I truly feel that structuring my classroom in a way that is comfortable to my students interests and needs (embracing new technology). I overheard so many conversations about “Teen Wolf” and “Walking Dead” in the classroom, what if we wrote an essay as the main character of one of these TV series through the lens of Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. I can have these students writing masterpieces without them even knowing it, but when they look back they will have the creative and literary power to take on college. I don’t know, I just know that I will never look at my class as a percentage. I want to value the effort of each student. I want them to feel like they have a voice, and opinion, and a magnificent brain (because they do!).

 

Thank you for every thing Kim, I hope that I have many more classes and semesters with you.