The mind and thoughts of TG

The presentations that were presented were all very informative and I could feel the wheels spinning in my head. Because I want my focus to be more reading and writing, the strategy I immediately connected with was story mapping. As students are making the transition to reading more difficult and challenging texts, story mapping could be a viable way of them keeping up with important information regarding the literature. It can also be a way of giving the students tools to use when summarizing a text. A lot of the pertinent information needed in story mapping, is also the information that can be used to provide a summary. In the classroom if the students have a guide that tells them what to look for, as they read over time it will train them to know what to look out for when reading. Graphic organizers, such as story mapping, can be adjusted to have the students look for certain information as well.

Everyday I learn more and more about becoming a teacher. Some of the information is overwhelming, mostly because so much information is being crammed into a short amount of time. But, it is a pleasant short amount of time. I often wonder if many of these strategies will be lost once I get into a rhythm or certain teaching pattern or style. I guess I overthink and really just want to be an effective teacher and be able to instill knowledge I've learned about how to teach. I can honestly say, these reading classes have been the most beneficial to me. Maybe because reading is my passion, maybe because they teach how to actually teach. Either way I have learned a lot these last two weeks. I'm a little nervous about becoming a teacher and am learning about the countless opportunities to be great, and at the same time the countless opportunities to be not so great. I hear that when you're doing something you love it pushes you to excel at the task. I've been in custo...

I can remember being a little girl and reading CAT on my grandfather’s cap and just reading anything I could get my hands on. When I was in middle school I figured out I could go to the public library and have access, to all the books I could read and so, I would ride the city bus to the library. As a teenager, I began a love affair with romance novels and we are still together today. I would read these magazines full of short stories with happily ever after endings. I also wrote my first short story. I would devour those magazines in a matter of days, and my parents grew tired of me asking for money to buy them. Finally, my stepmother, who was also an avid reader, deemed me old enough to read some of her books. That actually opened up my scope of preferred reading. She had mystery, autobiographies, science fiction and a lot of drama. I’ve read all genres and feel like throughout different phases of my life my interested genre has changed. Generally, mystery and romance stay, they’...

I had the opportunity to observe in a 5th grade classroom last semester. Since it was the latter half of the school year the teacher I was assigned to explained that the students were in review mode. Basically, she was not teaching any new concepts, just reviewing content they'd already learned. She also expressed the importance of STAAR, or the importance that was placed on the STAAR. Near the end of my observation time the kids were outside playing, unscheduled. What I learned on my first day there was the importance of time and how just about every minute of their day was planned out. So, to see these students outside playing was puzzling to me. I think she read my expression because she began to explain. "These kids are tired of tests, they are all tested out and I'm tired too, so I gave them some time to just take a break and have fun and get refreshed". Well given the prior knowledge of their testing schedule I had to concur. At that time, all I knew was what sh...

My senior year was filled with many highs and lows. I loved the idea of being an adult yet dreaded the ideologies that were associated with it. I had a few teachers that were instrumental in helping me feel more comfortable about the future and some that showed me just how ill equipped I was. My favorite was English. I loved writing and although no one thought our teacher was cool, I did. He encouraged me to write and to write with pride and to take my writing seriously, he is the reason I majored in journalism, well my first of many majors anyway. He challenged me to think outside of the box and realize there was more to life than just getting by, that I could excel at anything, even those things I had no idea existed.  I can honestly say I began hating, yes I know that is a very strong word yet, nothing else describes the relationship I have with math as accurately as the word hate. In 9th grade I had a teacher, and by all accounts she seemed nice enough, but I was having...