Hello I’m First!
It is so great to be back and blogging! I am having a great summer! I still cannot believe that I will be starting on my second year of college in less than a month. In the last academic school year, I took a course called, Teaching Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Learners, As a part of this course, I had the opportunity to go into the classroom to work with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) learners or ESL students. This class really sparked my interest in education. So I decided to apply to Breakthrough Twin Cities to be a Breakthrough Teaching Fellow.
Breakthrough is a non-profit organization that serves under-resourced students to help them get into college. I was offered a position to be a Literature teacher and later took on this offer. I was lucky to had been able to meet and teach 18 phenomenal students in my literature course, and read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian with them. As a teacher, I wrote lesson plans that revolved around themes in the book like identity, poverty, hopes and dreams, and many more. My students and I were able to connect the concepts and themes in the book to the world and to our own lives. At the end of this course, all of my students created their own absolutely true diary!
My students taught me so much this year through the narrative of their own life in connection to the book. They taught me about the value of family and friends, the origin of happiness, resiliency, and the list goes on. My students are teachers themselves.
As I approach my second year of college, I am thinking about my experience as a Breakthrough teacher and my interest in education. I have found about myself that I do like working with young people, however, teaching a core subject is not what I am best at. I want to use my experience this summer to narrow down my major as that will be a process that I will have to go through this year. I am so excited and afraid to go back! These feelings give me all the reasons to persist this year!