Blog Assignment #1

Meet Me

Hi everyone. As you can tell by the header on my blog, my name is Sarah Lindley. I am a Secondary Education/Language Arts major at USA and I love it. For as long as I can remember I have wanted to teach. Since I love to read, I figured what better thing to do than teach what I love. The reason I chose to attend USA is that of all the other schools I visited, this place felt the most like home. Where is home, you may ask?

Well, I was born in Mobile but raised on the sunny beaches of Gulf Shores. No, this does not mean that I have a perpetual tan. I graduated salutatorian in a class of around 160. Gulf Shores is a town where everyone knows everyone else and they have for generations. While this may be comforting for some, I was ready to move on to bigger and better things.

 I am the youngest of four children. The unique thing about my situation is that there is an eleven year age difference between my closest sibling and me. There is an eighteen year difference from the eldest to me. This led to many people thinking she was my mom when I was baby. Obviously, they were wrong. Despite our age differences, my siblings and I are extremely close and I wouldn't have it any other way.

My Future Classroom

When I would first think about my future classroom, the thought that would come to mind would be a peaceful place with young adults sitting in neat rows eager to learn. Then reality sets in and I know that isn't going to happen. In actuality I will have to think of ways to keep my students engaged. Most will only be there because they have to be and they won't give a rat's behind about English.

In order to help keep them engaged I plan on getting them involved. Instead of having them sit there and listen to me lecture, I plan on having my students discuss things in groups. I will have activities that help them relate material that they may consider irrelevant to their daily lives.

I plan on assigning projects that will make learning fun. For example, when I was a senior in high school we studied the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. Once we had finished reading a few of them, my teacher had us write our own tales. Juvenile? That's what I thought at first, but as I began writing my story I began to have a new appreciation for the story written by Chaucer and the amount of creativity he possessed. I plan to implement such things so my students might come away from class with a new appreciation for literature.

I think the best way to describe my future classroom would be controlled chaos. I want my students to become alive and show their personalities while at the same time learning what they need to.

Randy Pausch and Time Management

What struck me right off the bat with this video was that Mr. Pausch said that Americans don't recognize time as a commodity. I couldn't agree more. I also liked what he said about having a plan. I'm like the people he described. I often don't make a plan because it will probably change, but after watching the video I realize that it's important to make the plan just so I'll have a point with which to start. I have a bad habit of procrastinating, but after watching this video I feel like I have some tools to help me combat that.