It was kind of difficult thinking of a memorable experience I've had from adulthood. Being 19, I feel like I haven't been an adult for very long and not much has gone on. But after thinking about it for a while, I chose my experience in joining Ready, Set, Teach. RST is a class that my friends and I took last year during our senior year of high school. The students got to leave campus for a few hours everyday and go visit a certain elementary school. The class was more geared towards students who wanted to become teachers in the future but the majority of us took this class just so we could leave school in the middle of the day.
At our elementary schools, we were each assigned a certain classroom to help out with during the year. I was assigned a 2nd grade gate class with nineteen kids in it. I was a little nervous and dreading it at first because I knew that was a lot of kids and I wasn't sure if they would even like me or not. But after their teacher introduced me on the first day and told them why I was there, the kids automatically treated me like we were best friends or something. After the first couple of weeks of getting to know everybody, I actually looked forward to going to their class everyday. When I would walk in the room every morning the whole class would scream my name and get all excited. It was pretty cool. They were always asking me what high school was like and they were all amazed that I knew how to drive a car. It is so funny how children are so interested in the littlest things.
At the beginning of the time while I worked in their class, the teacher would have me rearrange the bookshelf, grade papers, or go make copies. Which was mostly boring, busy work that I didn't really enjoy. But soon after that, she started letting me read books to the class at story time and even give them their spelling test on Fridays. It was way more fun because I got to interact with the kids. Some days I was even in charge of teaching the class their math or reading lesson for the day. That was a little more intimidating because that was a lot more important than just reading them a book. I didn't want to screw up the lesson and teach them the wrong thing. But I ended up doing alright.
There were a couple of students in the class that were severely failing their spelling tests. The teacher let me work with them in a small group everyday on the side of the classroom. We made up a game where I would describe one of their spelling words and the kids tried to guess which one it was. The first one to guess the word had to spell it correctly to get a point. It doesn't sound too great, but to them it was the best game in the world. The kids in the group took their spelling tests separate from the whole class and we always played that game right before. Apparently that game works somehow because they would always pass it afterwards!
At the end of the year it was kind of sad saying goodbye to them because I knew most likely I would never see them ever again. The only reason I joined this program was to leave school early but it ended up meaning a lot more. Before this experience, I never even thought about being a teacher in my life. My mom is an elementary school teacher which made me not want to do it even more, seeing all the work she has to do. But after this experience, I realized I really enjoy working with kids and it made me consider this as a possible career choice for my future.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Saving The Sea Turtles
If you asked a person what they thought about street lights, an average person would think they are very helpful tools in guiding a person safely down a street in darkness, or protecting people from danger when we cannot see clearly. What people don't think about is the negative effects of street lights or any kind of bright light close to the ocean or beaches.
Many innocent lives of helpless baby sea turtles are taken away every year just because cities put up more artificial lighting. People think they are saving lives by doing this but at the same time they are taking away many lives. I'm sure many are unaware of this problem and don't even know that they are contributing to it. I honestly didn't even know this was a problem until we watched the movie The City Dark. In the movie we met a man that explained the way turtles make it to sea. After they hatch and crawl out of their nest in the sand, the sea turtles follow the light of the moon and make their way safely to their new home in the ocean. But with so many lights so close to the shore line, it confuses the baby turtles and they don't know which way to go. They end up getting lost and dehydrated and many die. Fortunately for the turtles in the movie, the crew helped all of them get to the water safely.
But what if nobody was there while the turtles were hatching? Most of the time people aren't just sitting around a turtle nest just waiting to help them to the ocean. So most of the time, the turtles die. From some of the articles I have found online, I have learned that most types of sea turtles are already endangered and if this goes on for much longer, the sea turtles may even become extinct. Not many people are aware of this and there surely isn't going to be someone waiting at every turtle nest. Things need to improve so the turtles can make their way to the water the way nature intended. We need to let everyone know of this problem so we can come up with solutions that could save the sea turtles.
Many innocent lives of helpless baby sea turtles are taken away every year just because cities put up more artificial lighting. People think they are saving lives by doing this but at the same time they are taking away many lives. I'm sure many are unaware of this problem and don't even know that they are contributing to it. I honestly didn't even know this was a problem until we watched the movie The City Dark. In the movie we met a man that explained the way turtles make it to sea. After they hatch and crawl out of their nest in the sand, the sea turtles follow the light of the moon and make their way safely to their new home in the ocean. But with so many lights so close to the shore line, it confuses the baby turtles and they don't know which way to go. They end up getting lost and dehydrated and many die. Fortunately for the turtles in the movie, the crew helped all of them get to the water safely.
But what if nobody was there while the turtles were hatching? Most of the time people aren't just sitting around a turtle nest just waiting to help them to the ocean. So most of the time, the turtles die. From some of the articles I have found online, I have learned that most types of sea turtles are already endangered and if this goes on for much longer, the sea turtles may even become extinct. Not many people are aware of this and there surely isn't going to be someone waiting at every turtle nest. Things need to improve so the turtles can make their way to the water the way nature intended. We need to let everyone know of this problem so we can come up with solutions that could save the sea turtles.
Monday, April 1, 2013
Importance of the Sky
It is crazy to think that for all our lives, we have lived in this world and have never truly appreciated what was right above our heads. To us, Earth is a massive planet. But when you really put it into perspective, we are one of the smallest planets in the entire galaxy. The sky contains so much more than just thousands of twinkly little stars. It is what everybody is a part of. When we look at the night sky, we try to find all the constellations and all the stars that connect to each other to make a picture. But not many people have actually wondered why the stars connect up to make certain constellations or how they even got there. The sky is a great mystery and a wonder that we are a part of.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, eloquently summarizes one of the humanistic values of the night sky: "You could live your life at home never looking up....[but] I ... submit to you that you'll be missing a point of view, ... a cosmic perspective, because ...you'll start thinking of your own environment as all there is. And if that's how you think about where you are, then it rises to an artificial level of importance to you, whereas, when you look at the night sky and you realize how small we are within the cosmos, it's kind of a resetting of your ego. To deny yourself of that state of mind, either willingly or unwillingly, in my judgement, is to not live to the full extent of what it is to be human" (qtd. in City Dark).
Like Tyson said, you'll start to think that your environment as all there is. But there is so much more than that. The Earth is a tiny piece of the entire Milky Way. Our galaxy is so large, that we cannot even comprehend how big it is. When people don't stand back and appreciate we're a part of, they lose a point of view. Some people need to simply go sit in their backyard and just look at the stars. It will really make you think about the world we live in and how important it truly is.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, eloquently summarizes one of the humanistic values of the night sky: "You could live your life at home never looking up....[but] I ... submit to you that you'll be missing a point of view, ... a cosmic perspective, because ...you'll start thinking of your own environment as all there is. And if that's how you think about where you are, then it rises to an artificial level of importance to you, whereas, when you look at the night sky and you realize how small we are within the cosmos, it's kind of a resetting of your ego. To deny yourself of that state of mind, either willingly or unwillingly, in my judgement, is to not live to the full extent of what it is to be human" (qtd. in City Dark).
Like Tyson said, you'll start to think that your environment as all there is. But there is so much more than that. The Earth is a tiny piece of the entire Milky Way. Our galaxy is so large, that we cannot even comprehend how big it is. When people don't stand back and appreciate we're a part of, they lose a point of view. Some people need to simply go sit in their backyard and just look at the stars. It will really make you think about the world we live in and how important it truly is.
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