School Days.

I am scared. I am not afraid of the person, but of the situations that will happen and how I will handle them. I am afraid I will not show equity and not give my best. It's the fear of the unknown that strikes, and it can be paralyzing. I hope this is not true for me.

In all of that, I was referring to teaching. Today I started my TE 204 class- Typical/Atypical Child Growth & Development.

I have heard that this class is often the turning point for those who think they want to become educators; this class weeds out all of the people who aren't up to the everyday challenge of teaching. It separates the capable from the incapable. I sure hope I'm among the capable.

It's not that I will be completely dreading teaching after this class, but I know it will definitely open up my eyes to every type of student out there. We were assigned topics for our PowerPoint presentations today- everyone drew a different topic, each one about a different disability. I drew "osteogenesis imperfecta." What in the world is that?! It made me realize that there are soooo many kinds of disabilities, whether they are physical, cognitive, social, or emotional. And as a teacher, I have to be prepared to handle them all. ALL. Granted I will have a special ed. teacher to help me along the way, but I will still have to find a way to teach every student in their own learning style so that they will all have the equal opportunity of learning. It will be hard to be patient with the slower learners, as well as making sure that the quick learners have enough to keep them challenged. Instead of in the past, where teachers just assigned the same work to each student and they either passed or failed, I am going to have to learn to differentiate. I completely agree with Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences- I know that each child possesses every one of the intelligences, but not each child has a high level of skill in each one. Like the typical stereotype, that football players do poorly in school. This may be true of many people, that they excel greatly in the intelligence of kinesthetics (sports, etc.), but they lack a lot of the intelligence in another area, such as logic or linguistics. As a teacher, I will have to strive to reach over and above the old style of "easy teaching," and discover ways to help each unique child.