User:Ekett001

Hello All!

My name is Elizabeth and I am a senior at ODU. I have been a senior for quite some time now, just taking one to two classes at a time to finish up my degree in elementary ed. I have about six more classes left! :) I am taking this class at the Va Beach center although I take a majority of my classes on campus in Norfolk. I work a full time job of 40+ hours at the NAS Oceana Youth Center in Virginia Beach. I am the teen coordinator there so my primary job is to work with the big kids - can be a challenge, but also a lot of fun and excitement with amazing trips like white water rafting, skiing, and next summer - Italy!

I have a large family - oldest of six siblings and I am very close to all of them. A majority of my spare time (which is not much) is spent with friends and family and most recently working on my new home that I just moved into this past weekend! I love art, reading, being outdoors, and am a huge movie buff. I have been working with kids for 10+ years and am looking forward to one day having a classroom of my own! :)

My Educational Philosophy:

I think being a good teacher is really something you have to want to be - it is not going to happen over night and it is not going to happen just because you get a degree. Being a teacher that actually reaches children requires a desire, a will to work hard, be consistent, be caring and nuturing and then also having the much needed education to actually teach the required material. I want to be the kind of teacher that students will remember. I had a fifth grade teacher, Ms. Simpson, that I remember so much more about than all my teachers, even my high school teachers. She made learning fun and we did so many interactive activities that tied into the material that I truly couldn't tell you exactly when I learned the things I learned. I just remember that I wanted to go to school because of how amazing she was as an educator and as an individual. She was there for her students both in the educational sense but also was in tune with what was going on in our daily lives and she showed that she cared without becoming unprofessionally involved with her student's personal lives. I hope that one day I can learn this finesse, this attitude that will make be the teacher that a student can remember in detail, nearly twenty years later.

For me, I think I have also learned a lot about the kind of teacher I want to be through my current job. I have worked with children for ten years and although it is not a typical classroom setting, I have dealt with a very diverse group of kids. We have "at-risk" youth at our center and we have students with learning disabilities as well as physical disabilities and the experience I gained just from daily interactions with children who don't fit the norm, I believe, will be invaluable to me when I become a teacher. I definitely believe that every student is different, with different learning styles and different abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. To ignore those differences rather than celebrating them will not only cause the students to dislike school but it will give the teacher more work and it will take away the opportunity to teach the kids about diversity and how being different from one another is also a way to learn more about the world. I plan on (hopefully) learning about different methods to teach the same topics because I had a hard time in school when a teacher taught to primarily the visual learner. I am a kinesthetic learner so I learn best by doing and half the time I ended up having to take extra work home and teach myself because I just couldn't get it when it was just written on the board. I had to do, so I hope to be a teacher that really is able to plan based upon the learning style makeup in the classroom.

My classroom environment is something that I haven't really thought about. I hope that I am able to create an inviting atmosphere, one that encourages interaction amongst the teachers, students, and parents alike. This is one area that I really want to learn more about and try to find what I think would fit with my teaching style. Technology is also a topic that I need some time to think about. Who knows what technology will be available once I actually get my own classroom? I do know that it is definitely important to give the students the education about technology because it is becoming pretty impossible to be technologically illiterate and still succeed in our society. Overall, I think that I still have some soul searching to do to figure out exactly how I want to approach being a teacher. I have some old habits to break, based upon working in the child care industry for so long and I also need a lot more experience with creating lesson plans based upon required curriculum and SOLS. I am really looking forward to being a teacher and I hope that I am able to bring all my goals, ideas, and values about teaching to fruition.