Journal Entry for 10-9-2008

To start out, I’m going to respond to the last journal. When my group finished early when we were doing the list about Bloom’s Taxonomy, I think we finished first perhaps because we talked about some of the things we were going to be writing down during our ramp exercise. Maybe, without thinking about it, we had already covered some of the topics that we were going to answer that day in class. Last time I printed my paper, I went and looked for the moon and was unable to see it because it was way too cloudy. I hope that tonight I will be able to see it, however late it is when I go to print this paper.
Last class period, we talked about our glue experience with two different classmates. My partners were Sonja and Henry, and I thought it was really cool to hear the different things that they had to say about their pictures. They both had really good answers to what they experienced during the glue experiment, and I didn’t think that different people could experience as many different things about just one topic. But looking back, it makes sense because with that experiment so many different things could have happened because we were given the freedom to learn on our own and combine things in any order and amount we wanted. Henry’s glue became almost like soup, because he poured a lot of something into his bowl that was not starch. So his experience was different from mine, because he spent almost the entire time either trying to fix his experiment, or cleaning it up after he decided it was a complete failure. Sonja’s project went well, so for her it wasn’t as big an issue trying to figure out what exactly to do, because it worked out well. And my project, it went not so well to begin with, but eventually when I was on the verge of giving up, I figured out a way to make it all work out well and it ended up being okay. I think that from this I learned that even though things may feel like a failure at the time, if you don’t give up and you keep on trying and working on it, then you will be able to figure out things and accomplish things that you would never think possible.
Getting started on the blogspot over the break was a bit hard. It seemed to me that whatever kind of ideas I had last Thursday just kind of left my head, and it definitely did not help things to not have class this past Tuesday. I would have been glad to have had class then, because I feel that when I miss class or we don’t have class, that my so called “creative juices” would not be able to “flow”. I think that it would have helped me to be able to see other people’s blogs still, but so far I only have Trey and Brittany’s blog url’s, and that’s because I was sitting next to them in class. Even still, it was very helpful to look at Brittany’s, because I even borrowed a picture from her blog because I was actually in one from a day that we taught in a Physical Education class that we have together.
In that class, we got to teach at an elementary school, and it was a lot of fun. It also was very informative and educational because I was able to see what it would be like to be a P.E. teacher for younger kids. I had an idea, but it was good to see from more of a firsthand perspective what it would be like to do that every day, and I have to say that I would love going to work if I got to spend my day with kids like that. Even though they’re learning things during P.E. class, they don’t necessarily realize it. They can be learning fitness ideas and skills, but think that they’re only playing a game. And almost every child has a desire to be active, if not only to have fun. So that experience definitely did not turn me off from teaching, in fact, it kind of instilled the desire deeper inside of me. It helped reinforce my desire to be a teacher.
In class Thursday, we also did a practice mid-term exam where we practiced naming the different members of the class and saying three things about them. I thought that I would do well on it, but not as well as I did. I was very happy and impressed with how well I did, because I only missed 2, and I definitely had more than 3 things to say about the people that I missed the facts on, and one of the misses was a technicality because the metal was in her leg, not ankle.