Connecting School and Home Experiences

I feel fortunate to have grown up in a home where knowledge was valued and sought after.  Both of my parents read the newspaper everyday and cared and talked about what was happening in the world.  I grew up being very aware of the world around me.  I think this was the beginning of my love for politics and being "civically" active in the world.  My political science class sealed the deal on my love of the subject and I knew that I wanted to pursue a career centered in teaching government classes to help foster that love in other students.

When it comes to history, I always had an affinity for knowing about and seeking to understand the past.  Anything old that I could hold in my hands said so much to me, and my parents understood that.  They would get me books, and my Dad would bring home old artifacts or replicas as souvenirs for me when he went out of town on business.  I know this enhanced my love of history.  My parents were also very supportive in my passion for history by attentively listening to me when I wanted to share what I was learning in school or on my own.  Being able to verbally express my excitement played a huge role in my decision to teach.

Math, it is more difficult to think about where my love of math came from.  Was it from my grandpa's dry jokes about math? He was a professor teaching electrical engineering and loved a good joke, the drier the humor the better.  Or did it start when my parents gave me a whiteboard and I would do math problems on it just for fun?  Is it in my genes?  My grandpa, all of my uncles, and over half of my cousins are engineers and have an ability to both understand and appreciate mathematics.  I've been surrounded by people who love mathematics and think very logically about the world around them.  No doubt this rubbed off on me and impacted by choice to getting a teaching degree in mathematics.

In my world, it is normal to have discussions about history, politics, and math.  Most of my family members enjoy it immensely.  I know that there are many applications outside of a classroom that can be made to enrich our lives and help us become better citizens.  I want students to have this opportunity as well.  On the other hand, I understand that many students do not have the family support that I had that fostered my love of these subjects.  For example, it is so common to hear people talk about how they avoid talking about politics or current events at the dinner table, or any time at all.  I will need to be sensitive to those situations and realize that everyone does come with different backgrounds.  I think I want to bring those backgrounds into my teaching.  I want students to feel comfortable with wherever they are at in their interest of the subject, but help them to have open minds about learning, and perhaps coming to love a subject.  I want to give students a chance to discuss current events and politics in the classroom the way I discussed with my parents, and to give them opportunities to handle historical artifacts that make history come alive. Maybe I'll throw in some dry math jokes too! I am excited to be a teacher and realize that I will have a lot of learning to do in terms of how to help me students feel connected to or appreciate the content area.

Affective Dimensions of Reading

As a child I loved to read.  I would always have at least a few books on my Christmas wish list each year, and I enjoyed exploring different worlds through books.  As school became demanding with books, I read less and less for enjoyment purposes and more for academic purposes.  I would consider myself a "good reader" because of my ability to comprehend what I read.  I'm  not the fastest reader, especially when it comes to the readings we're assigned for school, but I have an ability to comprehend the text before me and know how I can best apply that knowledge to my performance in a classroom setting.  I love non-fiction books centered on history, that is what the majority of my own personal library looks like.  I love being able to look at the same historical time period through different lenses, and reading historical non-fiction gives me a lot of lenses to look through.  I also spend a lot of time reading online about anything that interests me as well.  I appreciate a good classic novel as well, I don't read them as much as I would like because school reading consumes most of my time.

One occasion where I really enjoyed reading was when I read Lois Lowry's The Giver.  I read it on my own, not for a class.  I loved this book, and it has since become one of my all-time favorites, because of how much I thought about this book.  It just stayed with me, and I've read it several times since.  It was well-written but also impacted my worldview, and it just sunk in.  I had a similar enriching experience with Chaim Potok's The Chosen.

I disliked the reading that I had for my science classes both in high school and college.  It was all from a textbook, and I felt really disconnected from the text, and couldn't see how the reading benefited or applied to me.  I had a poor attitude about the readings I had to do, and because of that, I struggled to absorb the information as well as in times when I was positive about the readings and had a desire to learn the material.

I felt a lot of encouragement from my family and friends to read.  I grew up in a home with two parents that both engaged in a lot of reading, so it was never discouraged and I learned of its importance through them.  I had friends who also liked to read, so I felt encouraged to read whatever I could get my hands on.  I guess I went through a phase in middle school where I thought reading "wasn't cool."  I can't say that I pressure to not read from any specific person, but I worried for a year or so of my middle school life that I'd be looked at as a nerd, which at the time seemed like a bad thing(I've since embraced me "nerdiness" so it's not a concern for me now!).

I feel that there needs to be some kind of connection to the reading, a sense of relevance to the lives of my future students.  I need to carefully select texts and have those reading selections play a meaningful role in my classroom.  I think at appropriate times having students choose their reading out of multiple options helps give students some level of ownership in the reading, and it could also be a way to bring multiple perspectives into a class discussion.  In talking about readings, I feel it is extremely important to respect the opinions of students and what they gathered from their readings.  Too often when talking about readings in school, the 'discussion' consists of IRE cycles, and that does not help foster a deep understanding or application of the reading.  I think respecting students' views of the reading and building meaningful discussion on their views will help students realize that they are capable as readers, which can improve their self-image.