Learning Letter

               The assignments that we have had in this class have been some of the most fun projects that I have done in a while, even though that sounds like an oxymoron. The book talk was the very first presentation we had and I thoroughly enjoyed getting to talk about a book I loved to the rest of my fellow future teachers and gave them some ideas on how they could implement the book I picked in to their curriculum. Being the first presentation of the quarter, I did not time out my presentation that well and found myself rushing to finish the rest of what I had to say near the end, so in the future I would probably do well to time out my presentation in a more realistic way, but other than that I fulfilled every requirement and did not bore everyone to death. The next presentation, the mini-lesson, was probably the least painful group assignment that I had ever had. Not only did it not heavily rely on my group members’ works, but my group members actually completed their parts on time and there was not even a slacker in the group that I could point out. The topic of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is one of my favorite short stories and getting to do a lesson on the theme of Gothicism (plus including a movie trailer from a recent movie) made it the most active lesson that I had ever come up with and I incorporated that activeness in to my three-week unit plan. The feedback that I received from the rest of the class at the end of my mini-lesson was very insightful and I will definitely be taking their suggestions for improvement to heart. The last assignment, the three-week unit plan, was by far the largest assignment I have ever had in my academic career. I put so much of myself in to that assignment that it does not really matter to me what grade I get, I did it to the best of my ability and that is all that matters to me. This being said, there are still some things I would like to improve on it, such as spending a little more time on the smaller sections of the unit rather than putting literally all of my effort towards the bigger sections so that when it came time to complete the smaller sections I was out of energy. Hopefully they did not suffer too greatly because of that, and other than that, until I receive more feedback on it, I do not really know what I would do differently for that assignment.

            Also in this class, we explored many theories and concepts on teaching literature to adolescents. Many of the theories that we talked about became very useful when it came time to start writing out my lesson plans and come up with ways to not make them stale and repetitive. Perhaps the most useful piece that we read for this class was the book Readicide by Kelly Gallagher. This book talked about how the overabundance of work emphasized on just a few texts was enough to get students to lose interest in reading for luxury outside of the classroom. As a future Language Arts teacher, this is one of my biggest fears in the future of my career and it was comforting to read about ways that I can help prevent this from happening. The most useful concept I felt that I learned about in this class is including pop culture in the classroom. I was assigned to exemplify this concept in my mini lesson and did so by showing a modern movie trailer that included a theme in the text that students were supposed to have read. By showing this trailer, students were found to be engaged in the lesson and willing to participate in a seemingly average activity. Getting students engaged in lessons is one of the biggest challenges I feel that I have to overcome, so it was awesome to find a way to get them to the level of engagement that I wanted. One theory we learned about in class was about the “pedagogy of the oppressed.” In this theory, passive students are likened to being oppressed because they are not actively participating in the learning community, and instead are being taught at. After reading about this, I agree that students need to be involved in the learning process, otherwise the learning process is useless and students might as well just be lectured at with earmuffs on, losing out on all of the potential learning that is trying to be offered to them in the wrong way.

            Finally, this course has made be grow vastly as a future educator. I feel that I can finally complete an EdTPA lesson plan in full without missing any crucial parts or details. I grasped the concept of academic language from this class and after that it was like all of the pieces started to just fall in to place for me. By completing all of the assignments and actually reading all of the readings that we had, I was able to get an insight of what the future holds for me, and I see myself liking it every challenging step of the way. For as long as the unit plan assignment was, I pretty much actually enjoyed doing it because I knew exactly what I was learning from completing it and did not feel like I was just completing it for a grade. Getting to see all of my peers present in front of the class and have us act like we were their students was both entertaining and allowed me to reflect on my own teaching when I was able to provide feedback for them. I guess it made me hold myself accountable for the commentary I was giving them and making myself follow it as well. I know that this class has the potential for scaring off potential educators and make them second-guess themselves, but for me, this class made me all the more excited to move on and up in to the world of English education.