College

Some days,
I just want to stay in college foever.

I love being a student. I know how to be a student. I love everything about campus. I love learning! My passion for education lead me to choose a teaching major. Part of my teaching philosophy is creating, "life long learners".  I know I'll be sad when I leave college, but I'll never stop learning. I am the nerd that downloads textbooks to my kindle so I can read MORE about being a good teacher. I just want to know EVERYTHING. (this also leads to me acting like I know everything, which is quite annoying. And I don't. I just really like to research and learn). Like for some reason I decided I REALLY wanted to learn about how health insurance worked. This led to several hours on the internet researching and learning. I know, I'm kind of weird. My friend in high school used to laugh at me because I had books by my bed that i called my, "fun books" AKA fiction books, haha!  I want to instill a passion for reading in my students. I am in a literacy class right now ,and it is incredible how you learn to read and write. A lot of it is done without the help of anyone, it's kind of automatic. Writing starts with pictures, moves to scribbles, moves to pre-writing with scribbles and a letter or two thrown in, then phonetic spelling, then advanced writing/spelling. The better you are at spelling the better your reading comprehension is. That's why teachers make students memorize and take spelling tests! You are better are decoding words if you've seen a familiar one before. It's awesome! And there's like 1000 theories on the "right" way to teach writing, reading, and spelling. And it's my overwhelming job to take these methods, make sense of them, and create my own idea of how to do it.
I'm excited to teach, but also extremely nervous. There's a couple classroom management theories I playing with:
1) cooperative discipline: this means you allow the student's to create the rules and consequences in the classroom. it creates democracy and the responsibility is to the individual since they agreed and created the rule.
2) assertive discipline: I love this book called Tools for Teaching by Dr. Fred Jones. And he is assertive discipline. It's basically about stopping undesirable behavior before it becomes a problem. There are several techniques to do this-->this is a "high control" teacher. I think I am high control. I want my room to run smoothly. I will trust my students to be responsible for themselves, but if they choose to not be, there will be consequences. If you trust them and give them the opportunity to behave, they will.
3) Love and Logic. Jim & Jay Funk created this theory. It's basically about using logical consequences, but LOVING your students so that they want to behave because they respect and love you. I like this one, but it is low control--meaning, you really don't do much disciplining. Which is great, as long as it works!
Every classroom is different, I just really want my students to create a democratic environment where they learn to trust each other and myself. I want a learning community, not a classroom. We will learn from each other (Vygotsky's theory of cooperative learning.) rather than from me. I will not lecture or give worksheets (except for a few). They will learn from hands on.
You do NOT want your child learning from a teacher that sends home a daily worksheet. Trust me, this is a sign of a lazy teacher that does not care! Worksheets are easy! experiments, group activities, discussions, are difficult to plan and teach, but they teach and reinforce soooo much more!


WOOO that was a long post. But this is really for me to remember all that I have learned this semester & how I feel about it!