Hello! I am Whitney Leavitt. This is my 5th year
at Eastern Washington University and I am currently enrolled in English 493:
Teaching Literature to Adolescents. I am
also known as Ms. Leavitt at Shaw Middle School! This will be my 3rd
quarter in the classroom and in January I will be a full time student teacher
for 11 weeks! I am so excited but also very nervous. I still feel so young and
I have so much to learn, but I know I will grow from this experience.
Seeing that I am placed in an eight
grade English classroom, many of the lessons that are going to be taught
revolve around adolescent literature. This year, the students will be reading, The Giver, Daniels Story, Number the Stars,
Devils Arithmetic, Torn Threads and many other short selections from Springboard. With these selections we analyze the elements
of fiction, study vocabulary, and relate situations in the story to personal
and current problems. The goal is to read between the lines and find a deeper
meaning; putting ourselves inside the shoes of the characters rather than just
being an innocent bystander. Going along with my literature experience in the
classroom, I am of course a student myself and have had many courses where I
have to read a piece of literature and write a paper on a specific topic or
break it down and go over the words with a fine tooth comb, looking at a text
in more ways than one.
As a potential teacher of English
and Language Arts, I believe a strength of mine is having the ability to create
a lesson in a fun way that is both educational and engaging to students. Another strength would be checking for
understanding. Many students are afraid to ask for the help of a teacher and
would rather leave a worksheet blank or sit silently during discussions. I
always walk around and help the reluctant students and am aware of the students
who are not participating and find ways to help them be involved. A weakness of
mine would be that I do not know everything! But good thing teachers don’t need
to, I have ways of helping students find the right answers rather than just
giving it to them (in some cases I really don’t know the answer!). I also have
a tendency to not see a text in more ways than one. There has been a few times
where I have discussed a text with the class and have been surprised to find
that students see it differently than me. Lets just say in a classroom,
students are not the only ones learning something!
By taking this course I hope to be
a more efficient reader. I want to be
able to pull out themes, look at them from every angle and relate them to the
world we live in. I also want to build my vocabulary and apply it to my every
day language. I hope to learn reading and comprehension strategies that can be used
in the classroom. I want to be more aware of the literature that is around me and
use these tools as an important supplement to the classroom.
In this course I want to develop a
three-week unit plan. I want to be well
rounded in the different beliefs, attitudes and cultural perspectives in
adolescent literature. I want to have either read or be well versed in
literature that would appeal to students in the secondary level.
LETS GET STARTED!
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