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Dixon Gerber
McKay Student Ambassador
Elementary Education
Over the last week, I have learned so much in all of my classes. While not all of my classes are for my major, I still learn aspects of being a better teacher through these classes. Here are lessons I learned from my Children's Literature class, TELL 450 and Multicultural Education classes, and my Songwriting class.
Children's Literature:
In my children's literature class, we talked a lot about illustrations, how they impact the reader, the different meanings illustrations have, and their contributions to a text.
The main book we analyzed was Big, by Vashti Harrison. In this story, a nameless girl grows up and is bigger than most people her age. It starts off as a positive thing, but over time people start to judge her or exclude her because of her size. In one spread, she is invited to be a mountain instead of a flower like everyone else in the class. It was extremely hurtful because she also wanted to be a flower but because she was "Big" she couldn't be a flower. The illustrations throughout the book show the emotions. She felt trapped and judged.
At one point in the story, she is crying a puddle. There are some good words that form from the tears, but there are many more words that are negative. She comes to realize that being big isn't necessarily a bad thing. The illustrations show her separating those positive and negative comments and returning the negative comments with the words, "These are yours. They hurt me."
I love this concept of being willing to take what people have thrown at you and calmly saying that it hurts. It shows two responses. One where they don't understand and one where they apologize. This is a book that belongs in the classroom because it shows through words and illustrations just how hurtful words can be, and how you can handle a situation similar to this girl's situation.
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TELL 450 and Multicultural Educaiton
Bias and micro-aggressions were a topic covered in both my Teaching English Language Learners and Multicultural Education classes. Something that stood out from the Multicultural education class was the sub-categories of micro-aggressions: micro-insult, micro-invalidation, and micro-assault. This is frequently because of appearances and stereotypes. Teachers are no exception to this.
As teachers especially, we need to be careful with what we say and how we say it. No two people are exactly the same. It can be difficult to carefully word what you want to say. For example, in my TELL class, we talked about people from other countries that don't look or sound like us. However, we have to be mindful of our students because there are many second generation students that were born and raised in the United States. We can't assume that people who speak a different language or look different from us are from outside of the country.
Songwriting 186
In my songwriting class this week, I learned how difficult it can be to write music with a group of people. There are so many aspects of music that go into planning and writing a song, and when styles vary, it can lead to some contention. I felt like the mediator in the small group because one group member jumped into an idea we threw out and wrote an entire background track, which was quite good. However, the track didn't sit well with the other and he didn't feel like it represented him. He had a hard time getting into the song so we had to completely restart and look at different ideas we could write about.
Brainstorming was good and we came up with a few ideas that we felt would be good. As a teacher, I recognize that my future students won't always get along with one another and sometimes there needs to be a mediator so both parties can have their ideas expressed.
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