Gabrielle Winters | Learning Engineer

Commented on: Haley & Taylor’s blogs

I was lucky enough to grow up with a father who was willing to be the sole provider for my family, and a mother who was willing to stay home to spend her days teaching me, instead of going to work and building her own life outside of my family. This enabled me explore many topics as in depth as I desired. Growing up homeschooled has its many advantages. Some of which include, sleeping until 9:30, doing schoolwork in PJs, and having family vacations built around history lessons. There are also a few disadvantages to being homeschooled. One major disadvantage for me was not being given a strong foundation in English and Grammar. My education is well rounded in all other subjects and areas. My knowledge and love of English came from my independent studies. The only way my mother could teach English was straight from the textbook and provided worksheets. This facilitated a hatred of grammar. It wasn’t until I reached high school that I began seeing the patterns in sentences that I needed to follow in order to write. I never truly learned the grammar rules or even understood them. I, instead, learned by following the example I found in the books I read in my literature classes. My experience with English was limited, but I still had the freedom and time to do my independent studies to learn all that I could.

I want to teach in a way that I can give my students a similar education as the one I had. One filled with endless opportunities to explore and discover of my own with my mother/teacher there to facilitate and occasionally guide my learning. I want to teach in a way that encourages students to explore what interests them, while also learning all that they will need to succeed in the world and their futures. I hope to instill in my students the same thirst for knowledge that my parents instilled in me. The opportunities that my parents were able to give me through homeschooling is what gave me the desire to learn and to teach.

I am currently learning about assessments and what types of assessments will be most helpful to me and my students. “Authentic assessments of reading employ tasks that reflect real-world reading practices and challenges”(Read Write think). This is mildly overwhelming for me, because I didn’t have assessments in my education. I was so intensely excited about what I was learning that I wanted to talk about all of it with anyone who would listen, which usually was my mother and father. This gave my mother a clear understanding of what I was excelling or struggling with. This, I feel, puts me at somewhat of a disadvantage with my peers in class. To me, this only means I will work harder to understand, so that I may be a better teacher with each new thing I learn.

Having zero experiences in a classroom makes it somewhat difficult for me as I learn how to be a teacher, but I am determined to make it an advantage. I hope that my lacking knowledge of a typical classroom will give me room to create a classroom environment that is better equipped to use what I am learning now, instead of falling into patterns that other teachers tend to fall into. In a class discussion recently, we talked about how teachers can get lazy and lean on the typical lecture style of teaching, instead of continuing to make lessons more individualized to better student education. Because I have never been a part of this teaching style, I hope that I will be at an advantage to stay away from that pitfall.

Making the reading process visible through performance assessment. (2016). ReadWriteThink.