Final Reflection

What?
And so all good things must come to an end! C'est la vie! How to do this class justice in a blog...I won't. I have learned a lot from our discussions our activities and projects. It has been a great class to have at the beginning of the program...I think it gets us off to a good start thinking about students and the science of their minds while giving our first try at creating lessons for them. There was a lot of theories to learn and then a lot of ways that they contradict each other and a lot of generalities to sort through to get to a lot of specifics that could change into whole studies titled individually for each student we ever come in contact with. Vygotsky's ideas center around the idea that children learn through observation of adults while Piaget's theories are based on a progression through stages. Constructivists believe that students will create knowledge for themselves as they filter information through their own experience. And then other chapters focused on the fact that children are whole people not just knowledge receivers and discssed how their behaviors and morals would come into play in our classrooms.


So what?
A great way to think about this all in a way that was realy concrete for me was to think of Gardner's multiple inteligences and to recongize that lesson material needs to be presented in many different ways in order to reach each student and also because being presented multiple times is the way of getting information into long term memory. My perspective coming from this class is based on my understanding of the whole student. I understand that in order for school to translate to anything outside of school students must engage in authentic activities. They need to be taught to understand how a particular lesson applies to their lives and see math used outside of "math time" and literature used outside of "reading time." Compartmentalizing subjects or students is so artificial!


Now what?
Onward and upward. Now what? Now I go through the rest of my education with a great spring board for understanding how to design my classroom setting, my lessons, my management techniques in a way that works. I really think this class is perfect to have at the beginning and maybe even as a pre-requisite. Now I conquer the world of teaching and thank Dr. Cox in my autobiography entitled, Kathryn Rappleye: Teacher of the Year 2011. I am a kinesthetic personality type with talents in people and I'm pretty much going to love every student that comes into my classroom and trying to understand them through the theories I've learned teach them ways to use their talents to figure out how they are going to contribute to the world. I will then be sited in thier autobiographies as Kathryn Rappleye M.Ed. in books entitled something like, Little Timmy: Pluto is a Planet and I have Proof. That's all I can think to say that I haven't already said, though silly and idealistic it may be. I guess idealist may be one of the requirements for teachers as well. Thank you for a great semester!