Dear Dr. Agriss,
This
course, paired with Dr. Torgerson’s course on Teaching the Composition Process
kicked my butt. Amazingly, despite the fact that I never want to pile on a
workload like this ever again, I came away feeling far more prepared for work
as a Teacher than ever before. I have felt a fundamental change in me, namely
in my levels of preparedness for teaching. Time management was the only thing
keeping me from falling apart at the seams. My only wish was that I could have
had some semblance of free time. Between the reading and the projects, however,
for both classes… I had no social life to speak of, and no time to work on
personal projects.
The
reading, however, was probably the most rewarding part. While the Unit Plan was
a crash course in planning classes, the reading introduced me to a lot of
pedagogical texts and a lot of young adult text that students are currently
working with. It allowed me to see myself both as a teacher and a student, which
was an amazing feeling. I wasn’t just learning how to teach, I was feeling
myself become, albeit slowly, a teacher myself. Reading the young adult text
was both fun, and put me back into the High-School reading mentality,
considering what students might be thinking as they read.
The
pedagogical texts all had something new for me to consider, even if I didn’t
really take to them. The Team-Teaching stuff, for instance, wasn’t quite my
cup-of-tea, but I learned a lot about it and how it could be implemented. I
only wish our teaching pairs could have had more opportunity and time to teach
using some of the other methods other than co-teaching. It would have been
really interesting to see that stuff in action.
The
Book-Talk was probably my favorite thing about this class. I bought so many
books because of it and learned a lot about my fellow students’ taste in books.
It was really interesting to see the kind of variety that emerged. Since I
already reflected on the Unit Plan and the Mini-Lesson in previous texts, I’m
not going to retread them. All I’m going to say is that despite having my butt
kicked, it was worth it in the end. In part due to the relief of never having
to have that done to me again in the same fashion. Thank you for warning me at
the beginning of class that taking these two courses together was a real
killer.
Sincerely,
Natalie Ehret-Austin
