Rashel's Course Goals

My goals in the course for the semester are mainly to develop and fine tune my literacy teaching skills so that I can fully meet the needs of an extremely diverse student population. I know that this course cannot teach me everything I need to know, but can help me to develop skills and methods of learning new ideas and methods that I can use in my future classrooms. I want to be the best teacher I cane be and effective language arts instruction is crucial to this goal.
I have faced many frustrations with the Elementary Language Arts curriculum in the Teacher Education program here and I hope that this course can give me the springboard to bounce back from these frustrations and enter my internship feeling ready to teach Language Arts. My teaching major is actually Language Arts, the major was not entirely by choice as the Deaf Education program required all students to have Language Arts as their teaching major. I fully believe in the vitality of Language Arts in the school curriculum, but since it is so important I can actually admit that I was nervous when I first had to select it as my teaching major. I likely would have selected math or social studies at the time. However, I told myself that the program would be supportive and give me the LA teaching foundation. Sadly, I found that this was not the case though. Most of the required courses were college level English classes that rarely ever allowed for connections to be made to elementary language arts. When I took TE 301 it was not entirely focused on literacy like my classmates. I did find TE 348 very useful and TE 448 informative, but 348 was the only one that really helped me move towards complete comfort in language arts instruction. I am hoping that this course brings me to this comfort.
I hope that this classroom provides me with lifelong colleagues, experiences, and a toolbox of knowledge and skills to have with me throughout my career. I want to be an amazing teacher like Mr. Falker or Ron Clark. In recent times, lots of books and movies about great and inspiring teachers have come to light. Some of these include Freedom Writers and A Bronx Tale. I want to be a teacher similar to this. I want to be remembered for making a difference in my students' lives, even if it is only remembering a great lesson. I barely remember my elementary learning, particularly in language arts, and I do not want my students to feel that way. I want to take my experiences and learn from them to make me the best teacher for my students.