Challenges and Change

           

            Bernice Johnson Reagon said, “Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they’re supposed to help you discover who you are.”  This course has been a bit challenging for me, but in a good way.  When I opened and read the syllabus on the first day of class, I was a bit apprehensive about all the requirements.  I like being challenged.  I feel such a sense of achievement and satisfaction after completing a challenging course, and I am sure that the same will hold true at the end of this class.

One of our weekly assignments is to read a chapter.  The chapters in this book are approximately thirty or so pages long, which is fairly reasonable given that we have a week to complete the reading and write a reflection on the chapter.  I have learned so much from the chapter readings.  What stands out in my mind are all the strategies I’ve learned thus far.  I was elated to find that I already do some of these things in my classroom which makes me feel like I am doing my job as a teacher.

The “Getting to Know You” project was interesting to do. I enjoyed interacting with my classmate, Beauty.  She is such a positive, uplifting person and I am glad that I was able to get to know her better.  Beauty is from Woleai and, before I met her, I never even heard of the name of that island before.  She is so unique and her culture is quite different from mine, so I found it enriching when we traded information.  I enjoyed putting together the website for the class.  One of my hobbies is playing around with the layouts of online tools and it was a pleasure for me to do one for this course.

Another course requirement is to join the International Reading Association (IRA) and attend two of their monthly meetings.  So far, I have only attended one IRA meeting.  I used to attend the IRA meetings on a regular basis, but my schedule became hectic and I stopped for a while.  I took a friend with me to the last meeting, and she had never been to an IRA meeting before.  We were both so entranced by the presenters and I look forward to attending the next meeting.

I feel compelled to complete the SOLOM checklist and the culture project.  I feel like I would learn so much from these two assignments.  The SOLOM checklist will give me a good insight as to how to place my ESL students into their appropriate levels and I feel that doing the culture project will add to the trivial amount of knowledge about foreign cultures that I already have.

One thing I would like to improve upon before the completion of this course is my time management.  I would like to complete the assignments at least a day before the due date.  I find myself feeling quite stressed on Fridays and I would like to decrease that stress.  I plan to accomplish this by doing a little of each assignment at a time and look ahead to upcoming deadlines.

I feel that this course has, and will continue to, challenge me both as a student and as an individual.  Reading the chapters of the book takes a while for me to do and the book is full of useful information to use in the classroom that at times it seems overwhelming.  I believe it challenges me as an individual because it forces me to become more organized and time-conscious in order to complete the assignments by the due dates.  I feel it also challenges my personal literacy skills, particularly my writing skills, because there is a lot of writing done for this course. Fred Devito made a lot of sense when he said, “If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.”  I feel this course will change me for the better, and I look forward to that change.

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