What a beautiful opportunity to reflect on over halfway through my education degree. It is interesting to write a letter to my grade 8 self heading into high school and it is also interesting to reflect on the student and person that I was when I entered the faculty of Education at the University of Regina four years ago. It is hard to believe that four years ago I was accepted into education and I was getting excited about university but also I was so scared about how hard all the classes were going to be and how mean the professors were going to be. And although the past four years have been hard all the work and effort feel worth it. The classes that keep building on each other to help you better understand concepts so that you can be the best teacher are slowly becoming more and more interesting. And teachers that I may not have liked in the first years of my degree I am now trying to spend as much time with them chatting to learn all that I can from them.
My one hope is that I can remember all of the beautiful nuggets of wisdom I have received in the past four years. I know however this is not going to happen as we learn so much in this under grade that there is only so much that will stick with us through it all. However, one idea that has transformed the way I think of education is that students will not learn from teachers they do not like. When discussing what makes a good teacher in a class in my second year this hit me. I realized that all the formulas, lesson plans, and teaching strategies all needed to have the intent of building relationships with the youth and if they did not then there was no use because the student wouldn’t learn from the teacher anyway. This understanding has helped me keep in focus my mind that education and being a teacher are not curriculum-focused but student-focused. So above anything else I need to have my students in mind.