Summer Program

Welcome and thank you for joining me as I journey through my MAT experience. The summer required portion of the program was a blending of experiences and I cannot even begin to explain how much I learned as a student and future teacher. The summer began with a lot of nerves and questions. Would I like my classmates and professors? Did I make the right choice in Union and becoming a teacher? Could I handle the work? What do I expect? We all began the first day quiet, not overly chatty, with a presence of fear and excitement in the room. This all changed after we had a class retreat on the second day. Now I have to be honest, the thought of going on a retreat with complete strangers, being outdoors and in a cabin, left me feeling not too excited and dreading the two days. The experiences and friendships that developed after the two day excursion to Skye Farm, left me feeling extremely thankful at having had the opportunity to have this experience and getting to know my classmates. We returned to class the following week and the professors had to wait for us to quiet down because of the loud chatter and bonds that had been created. I will talk more about our Skye Farm excursion, because it was truly an experience I will not soon forget.

The classes over the summer met Monday-Friday, and often ran from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. These classes taught me so much about literacy, teaching strategies, how to plan and execute a lesson, how to think like a teacher and student and so much more. The morning classes were Psychology of Teaching and Literacy, followed by our Methods class (which corresponded to our discipline), followed by lab where we taught lessons to our classmates. The most nerve-racking part for me was the lab, because I had never taught before and teaching a lesson to fellow graduate students, scared the living daylights out of me. What I found though was endless support from my peers. We all encouraged one another, really emphasized the positive, but provided constructive feedback to each other, to help them better themselves. The professors over the summer were supportive, encouraging, provided so much knowledge, expertise and things to think about, I could not have asked for a better opportunity and professors to help me become the best teacher I can be.

Now I make this sound like the summer was not a challenge. The summer is tough, it is a lot of work and so much information being thrown at you, but it is completely doable. You are challenged. You are challenged to not only think about learning from a student perspective, but a teacher perspective. You are taught to think about what you are thinking about your thinking (if you have not heard the work metacognitive, you will hear it over and over and realize how important it is). The summer is a challenge, or at least it was for me, because I had been out of school for four years and really did not have much background in education, except for my schooling experiences. So I was learning a lot of information and was a student again.

Thanks for joining me on this journey. Much more to come on my internship and my path to becoming a teacher!


*Below, I have included a few photos from Skye Farm of the group and of us canoeing on the last day there!