At the beginning of the 2007 school year, the first major project we were assigned to complete was an essay, using Microsoft Word, about 5 educational experiences or lessons learned in our lifetime. The professor assigned some major criteria to address: why was it significant, which was involved, when did it happen, how did it affect your learning, and many more. At first I didn’t know what were the significant experiences in my life, but then I started to remember my favorite times in school or the activities I did that prepared me for my future. In no time at all I started to remember all these significant events that happened to me. One of my favorite and most influential to my future career was the time I went to London, England. This was very significant to my learning because I got to encounter the historical places I have been learning about since I was a kid as well as touching and viewing the historical places that I will be teaching in my future classes. Well enough about my experience, the essay was meant to give us a platform for the future assignments in the classroom.
Like I mentioned before that this assignment has helped me learn how I got to the place I am in today. It has taught me to look back from my everyday life and view my past experiences and see how they affected my future education. This assignment also showed me how to prepare myself for my professor grading style and his expectations for each of his students.
The only challenges I faced when working on this assignment was what events to choose, how to manage my time, and addressing all the criteria being asked for. To face the first challenge I basically wrote down all the events I could think of and choose which ones were most significant to my education and which ones prepared me the best for my future career. Managing my time was a problem for me because the essay turned out to be a very long one, around 3000 words if I am not mistaken. That is more than an upper-division history course essay, so I needed to balance my time to give a fair share to my assigned reading in my other classes. While I was writing my essay I read each criteria one by one and try to address each one to best of my ability. However I missed the part or overlooked the part where I was supposed to break them up into separate paragraphs so I lost some points on that. Other than those problems, it was a fun and interesting assignment and I got to look into my past to see what affected my future.
I learned a lot about myself from this assignment, because in life we never step back from our everyday occurrences and say, “how did I get to be here in this place?” I looked into my past and viewed the events and details that affected my decisions that led me to the place I am in now. I am happy that I made those decisions and I do not look back on them with contempt. This is one of those assignments that inspire me to use for my future classes, because they can work in any subject area. I can use this in a history class, but transform it to 5 aspects about their ancestor history (for example 5 aspects about the White Family in the history of Ireland). I still have a while to think about this new assignment, but it is a good place to start.
No comments:
Post a Comment