Assignment #1 - About Me

It's hard for me to name the funniest thing that has ever happened to me. Due to the fact that I am extremely clumsy, I feel that funny things are constantly happening to me. However, there are a couple of things that I believe make me interesting and unique. For about eight or nine years, I have been learning American Sign Language. I am pretty fluent in the language now. I originally became attracted to ASL when I took a Sign Language course during my freshman year of high school. Since then, I have completed other courses in the language and find myself practicing ASL whenever I have the chance to. I enjoy looking up how to sign new words and sometimes when I am listening to music, I will catch myself unintentionally begin to sign the lyrics. I am very fascinated by the language and I believe that it will benefit me as a future teacher to know American Sign Language. Another fun fact about me is that I have moved ten times in my life, which most people think is a lot!

As far as my education is concerned, I would be considered a fifth year senior. After switching my major four times and attending four different universities, I finally decided to follow my passion for teaching. I am currently a Family and Child Studies major with a concentration in Early and Middle Childhood Education (K-5). I also have a minor in psychology, which is a subject area that has always intrigued me. Next year, I hope to attend graduate school in order to obtain my M.A. in Counseling. This year, I student taught in a fourth grade classroom and will continue to student teach in a fourth grade classroom up until my graduation in January. Ideally, I would like to start off as a first or second grade teacher after I complete graduate school. To make myself more marketable and credible, I completed extra courses in both Science and English. This summer, I will be taking the Middle School Science Praxis exam and early next year, I will take the Middle School English Praxis exam. Due to the fact that I have enough Social Studies credits to complete the Middle School Social Studies Praxis, I might choose to take that exam in the future, too. I also hope that after many wonderful and enjoyable years of teaching, I will eventually be able to become an elementary school guidance counselor. I have always been a very understanding and empathetic person and I would absolutely love it if I could become a guidance counselor for young children one day.

I am extremely close with my family and I spend a lot of time with them. My parents are currently going through a divorce so as of right now, I just live with my mother and my younger sister. We have a dog that lives with us, too. Today is actually her 11th birthday! Even though I don't live with my father right now, I still see him almost every day. The most common activity that I share with my family would probably be going out to eat. I would say that we go out to eat almost every other week. This gives us an opportunity to catch up on one another's lives and spend extra time together. I enjoy it very much.

After reading through our course syllabus, the two topics that interest me the most are "the role of gender in families" during week two and the "effects of divorce on spouses and children" during week three. I believe that these two topics stand out to me the most because I feel that they can relate to my own family situation the best. Regarding the role of gender in families, I have always wondered how different the expectations are for sons and daughters, if there are any differences at all. Considering that my parents have two daughters, my sister and me, we were always expected to do a diverse array of chores and jobs, both inside and outside of the house. For example, we have been responsible for doing our own laundry but have also been responsible for shoveling our large driveway and raking the leaves in our big yard. We used to complain to my parents that "shoveling the driveway is for boys", although as I got older I began to feel differently about that. Whenever I tell my friends, both males and females, that I'm busy at the moment because I'm shoveling snow, most of them laugh. Many of my girl friends will tell me how their brother is responsible for shoveling the driveway and that they would never even dare to pick up a shovel. On the contrast, I also have boy friends that cannot cook and are not expected to do their laundry because their sister or mother does that for them. Although it seems stereotypical to some degree, I always wanted to know if my parents had also had a son, would he have been the one who was expected to shovel our driveway and rake the leaves? As a result, I am curious to see how gender plays a role in families. Moreover, I am very interested in the topic focusing on the effects that divorce has on both spouses and their children. Due to the fact that my parents are currently experiencing a divorce, I think that it would to helpful for me to learn more about this family issue. Considering that I am a "child" in my family, I would say that I am fairly familiar with the effects that divorce can have on children. However, it is more difficult for me to comprehend the effects that divorce is having on my parents because they do not talk to my sister or me about any of that. I think that it would benefit me to learn about and further understand both the negative and positive influences that divorce can have on family members.

Finally, I have mixed reactions to wikis. When I first discovered that this course was going to be primarily based on a wiki, I was petrified. The new version of Blackboard was confusing enough for me to figure out! I was so worried that it would be impossible for me to do well in a course that used a wiki. After watching the wiki video, I felt a lot more at ease. I liked how the video described the components of a wiki which were "edit", "save", and "link". It seemed so simple to me after learning that. By breaking down the steps of how to use a wiki, it appeared so much easier than I imagined it would have been. Although I am still very nervous to use a wiki, I believe that once I get more practice using it, I will become much more comfortable and hopefully I will even prefer a wiki to Blackboard.