Learning Letter

This course has been a fun and challenging experience in my teacher education program. More so than any other course, I feel as though I have learned some tangible methods that I can bring into the classroom to make me a better teacher. I truly feel sorry for non-English education majors who don’t have a chance to take this before jumping into the teacher education program. In this course we completed the large project unit plan, a mini-lesson on one of the required reading list books, and a book talk on a book from outside this class. The unit plan, although the most stressful and time consuming, was by far the greatest introduction to me of how teachers should write and prepare a lesson unit. As a teacher in practice I would probably not write a TPA formatted lesson plan for each day, but there is some value in having a unit already designed and ready to be used in the class. I thought the mini-lesson was an interesting way to interact with the required reading for the course, but the lessons and the teaching wasn’t exactly what I wanted from the class and I will probably not use any of the lessons that were taught in my future career. The book talk was a good idea in practice, however the way I approached it was to pick a new book that I haven’t read before and read it for the class. This wasn’t very smart because the new book added much more time in reading that I could have spent on doing other homework. All-in-all I thought that the class was well put together, only that many of the activities were repetitive in nature.

The theories and concepts that we discussed in class, including the two texts that we read for the class were very well done and I learned a lot from reading the texts. I really enjoyed Tovani’s book and Gallagher’s as well. Both books introduced me to new ways of thinking about literature. Many times in classes we are dealing with fictional students who are doing our assignments we make and the lessons that we plan and turn in for credit. While reading these books I actually was able to picture myself as an English teacher. The books really made me think about reading in the high school and how far away from actual reading the schools have come. Being a struggling reader myself throughout much of my school experience, I found that the methods that the two authors introduced would have been fun and engaging as a reader. Much of my reading in high school was about reading the book and then taking a multiple choice test at the end of the book. I think that these two books have really opened my eyes to the reading problem that we have in the schools, and how we can get students reading meaningfully, not just for show.

The participation in the class was important for understanding the materials, however I found that much of the time during class, we were able to do other things while also participating in the class. Having only ten students in the class (on a full day) makes it very difficult to get a large group conversation going. Other than having very few people in the class, I found that much of the content became repetitive for a while. Tovani talked about how reading was important for students, and Gallagher talked about how reading is important for students too. Although some of the materials overlapped a bit, the class discussions that we had were important as far as bouncing ideas off of each other and having lively talks about censorship and group discussion.