Never a doubt...until now

I have never questioned my self about wanting to become a teacher. I have never question my self about having the ability to become a teacher. In fact, I've always thought of my self to have a certain "greatness" when it comes to teaching. Obviously, I've never taught an actual class before, but I possess a lot of experience in teaching multiple Pre-k classes with a guided curriculum. How different could it be???

Back to this "greatness" though. I've always had this desire to help kids; which I might add that I'm great at. I have the ability to find ways of connecting their existing knowledge to new knowledge. I'm so creative that it stuns me sometimes to think that I actually came up that. For the most part, I am able to keep an open mind about things, seeing ideas from other perspectives.

This class has shattered my greatness. For the first time in 4 1/2 years, I've actually asked my self,"Is this the right profession for me?" This is NOT what I want to be thinking with less than a year left until i graduate college.

In terms of this class, I feel everything I've gained and learned about teaching in the past is the complete opposite of what we are learning now. I find my self evaluating everything that I've learned. I knew teaching was never going to be easy, but incorporating these styles of thinking into all content areas is going to be more than a challenge. I've always been able to handle a challenge, but i don't know about his one...

A true "love/hate" relationship

Science -A simple word with a complex meaning.

I can honestly sit here and say I have a true "love/hate" relationship with science. I love that I can use simple hypothesis' to gather evidence, and then make my own inferences about an idea. I love how science seems to take me on explorations. Most of all, I love that science is made up of "building blocks" of knowledge. (Building blocks to me are inferences gained from observations)

Take the concept of space, for an example. We now know the Solar System is part of many galaxies which exist in space. In order to get to this point of knowing, we had to build upon our knowledge of concepts that led to the discovery of space.

This is rough representation of the "building blocks" of the space concept mentioned in the above paragraph...
the Sun--> orbit of the Earth around the Sun--> the Solar System--> parts of the Solar System--> distant galaxies--> (?)--> (depends on the previous "building block")

This brings me to my frustration with science. I hate the fact that science has no definite answers. The idea of not being able to prove anything right or wrong allows science to have infinite answers to problems. This bothers me because my thinking tends to be concrete. Science is anything but concrete...

Student Goal Reflections

I visualize teaching a variety of ways. One way, particularly pertaining to this assignment, is the “thinking and doing” aspect of teaching. Visualize a problem in your head. When attempting to solve this problem, you must think of an idea to solve this problem. Then, you must physically do/not do something to carry out the idea to solve this problem. This is similar to what teachers do when teaching students. I will relate this “thinking and doing” concept to our K-12 classroom goals.

Its one thing for us to have these student goals; it’s another for us as teachers to find methods for these goals to be carried out. For me at least, the doing part of this concept will be the most challenging. Now days, students in schools are becoming more diverse. Teachers are having more students in their class with learning disabilities, different cultural experiences and a variety of socio economic statuses.

The goals we listed for students will be an ongoing task. These goals are far more complex than learning a few new objectives of a concept, but also –in my opinion, more important in the long run. The complexity of these goals will require many ongoing assignments during the course of school. Learning respect versus learning about volcanoes contributes to what kind of person you are. A person will most likely not use the information about volcanoes in their lifetime. However, they will use the learned knowledge of respect through out their lifetime. Even though the student goals are going to take a lot more time and effort, they will have a greater impact on students than traditional objectives will.