After the first class meeting, I am genuinely excited to jump into this semester. By the end of this course, I hope to recognize my strengths and weaknesses as a teacher. With my previous experience, I feel like I know some of those things already, but I'm ready to see how that will carry over to a teaching position. One of my weaknesses that I hope to overcome is my shyness. In class, I discussed how I struggle to speak in front of my peers. This is more prevalent particularly during presentations and class discussions.
I am very interested to know the kind of tools that I might be using/learning to better myself as a teacher. I would really like learn different ways to keep my students engaged in a class period. One of my former teachers once said that the average attention span of a college student was around 30 minutes. I can imagine it being the same, or less, with students in the middle grades. I'd really like to learn different techniques to use on different types of students that age. I want to be as efficient as possible.
