My qualifications for teaching English at the secondary level may not look similar to many past teacher corps cohort members. While I have been an avid reader and writer all my life, my college years were full of academic challenges. As the title of this portfolio suggests, I have not faced much success without the equally frustrating errors I have made.
Some perhaps arbitrary test scores from 2010 (wow) are below:
SAT Literature Subject Test Score: 710
SAT Subject Test Score U.S History: 590
SAT Critical Reading Score: 700
SAT Writing Score: 670
As an undergraduate, I was accepted into the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College at the University of Mississippi as an English Major. After my first semester, I transferred to the University of New Hampshire. There I suffered many academic failures, including poor grades, loss of scholarships, and at one point I faced the possibility of losing my position at the university. After a summer of working two food service jobs, dealing with back-to-back doubles and the reality of my failing college year, I decided to fly back to Oxford to petition the University of Mississippi to consider allowing me to return.
Ole Miss granted me re-admission under academic probation. I had never been so relieved to receive a second chance. Though my GPA was hovering just under a 2.0, I was able to work hard to move my grades up. I switched my major to Political Science, declared English at my minor, and found great happiness in working hard in school. Always a lover of learning, I found a huge relief in "restarting" my Ole Miss experience without the pressures of an honors degree track. I was able to make better relationships with my classmates and professors. I fell in love with school for the first time in my life.
These experience lend me some specific qualifications to help relate to my students. The first being: I, like them, have failed before. Many MTC candidates come from excellent universities, sporting the best grades, used to a competitive academic environment. I am not that candidate. I worked hard for three years to pull my GPA out of a gutter I had dropped it into as a careless freshman. I lost all of my merit scholarships and worked 40 hours per week all while in school. I learned through some really crappy decisions that everything I chose impacted me, whether negatively or positively. These experiences prepared me for the failures I would face as a first year teacher. I would not have achieved success in MTC if I had not failed as a freshman in college.
As far as English content knowledge is concerned: I was lucky to meet people who pushed me to grow as a reader and writer. As an ELA teacher at North Panola, I have had some great in-house professional development. I was lucky to work under Derek King's leadership as instructional coach last year. Throughout the school year, our department held English Instructional Strategies Meetings (ISMs) at least three times per week. This meant that instead of normal planning periods, we would meet to plan lessons and build the curriculum for 2.5 hours per week. Coach King taught me many valuable lessons about teaching. But some of his best examples were set by the person he was.
As a first year teacher, losing planning period was absolutely horrible. But, the knowledge I gained from working closely with Coach King was the best I could have received. He was able to help Ms. G and I scaffold all of the standards, so that we could prepare our students for exactly what they would need as college freshmen and sophomores.
My second year was in some ways a content knowledge roller coaster. As a department we were promised text books, class sets of novels, and outside professional development. As teachers, we received none of it. Our novel money was very likely laundered by our absent principal. Books were apparently purchased but few books were delivered. Without Coach King, our instructional coaching was offered by Ms. Robin Oatis. She is an absolutely fantastic instructional coach, due to the fact that she stepped into the position directly from the classroom. Ms. Oatis taught 8th Grade Writing at North Panola for over a decade. However, this left me the senior ELA/Writing teacher (lol). As a second year, I had no Coach King to tell me if what I was doing was correct. Ms. Oatis had a very quiet yet sensible approach to teaching Writing. Her anchor charts and strategies were freely offered to me, but a lot of the day-to-day instruction and activities were entirely up to me.
Possibly my two best experiences for professional development were not necessarily accomplished within the classroom. The first, was our summer class with Dr. Rutherford on promoting literacy in the classroom. Purposeful reading of texts completely changed my classroom. Dr. Rutherford gave a format for basing our ELA pedagogy. I was able to think about my students' reading and writing more holistically thanks to her guidance. The second best experience for professional development that I had was the curriculum building course for summer school. With the help of Dr. Sweeney, April Love, and Ian Gutgold, and per the suggestion of Camille Lesseig, I was able to help construct a Non-fiction English curriculum for summer school. The curriculum was built using Reading for Information standards as well as Reading for History standards. These two experiences helped me gain a better understanding of teaching English at the secondary level.
Some perhaps arbitrary test scores from 2010 (wow) are below:
SAT Literature Subject Test Score: 710
SAT Subject Test Score U.S History: 590
SAT Critical Reading Score: 700
SAT Writing Score: 670
As an undergraduate, I was accepted into the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College at the University of Mississippi as an English Major. After my first semester, I transferred to the University of New Hampshire. There I suffered many academic failures, including poor grades, loss of scholarships, and at one point I faced the possibility of losing my position at the university. After a summer of working two food service jobs, dealing with back-to-back doubles and the reality of my failing college year, I decided to fly back to Oxford to petition the University of Mississippi to consider allowing me to return.
Ole Miss granted me re-admission under academic probation. I had never been so relieved to receive a second chance. Though my GPA was hovering just under a 2.0, I was able to work hard to move my grades up. I switched my major to Political Science, declared English at my minor, and found great happiness in working hard in school. Always a lover of learning, I found a huge relief in "restarting" my Ole Miss experience without the pressures of an honors degree track. I was able to make better relationships with my classmates and professors. I fell in love with school for the first time in my life.
These experience lend me some specific qualifications to help relate to my students. The first being: I, like them, have failed before. Many MTC candidates come from excellent universities, sporting the best grades, used to a competitive academic environment. I am not that candidate. I worked hard for three years to pull my GPA out of a gutter I had dropped it into as a careless freshman. I lost all of my merit scholarships and worked 40 hours per week all while in school. I learned through some really crappy decisions that everything I chose impacted me, whether negatively or positively. These experiences prepared me for the failures I would face as a first year teacher. I would not have achieved success in MTC if I had not failed as a freshman in college.
As far as English content knowledge is concerned: I was lucky to meet people who pushed me to grow as a reader and writer. As an ELA teacher at North Panola, I have had some great in-house professional development. I was lucky to work under Derek King's leadership as instructional coach last year. Throughout the school year, our department held English Instructional Strategies Meetings (ISMs) at least three times per week. This meant that instead of normal planning periods, we would meet to plan lessons and build the curriculum for 2.5 hours per week. Coach King taught me many valuable lessons about teaching. But some of his best examples were set by the person he was.
As a first year teacher, losing planning period was absolutely horrible. But, the knowledge I gained from working closely with Coach King was the best I could have received. He was able to help Ms. G and I scaffold all of the standards, so that we could prepare our students for exactly what they would need as college freshmen and sophomores.
My second year was in some ways a content knowledge roller coaster. As a department we were promised text books, class sets of novels, and outside professional development. As teachers, we received none of it. Our novel money was very likely laundered by our absent principal. Books were apparently purchased but few books were delivered. Without Coach King, our instructional coaching was offered by Ms. Robin Oatis. She is an absolutely fantastic instructional coach, due to the fact that she stepped into the position directly from the classroom. Ms. Oatis taught 8th Grade Writing at North Panola for over a decade. However, this left me the senior ELA/Writing teacher (lol). As a second year, I had no Coach King to tell me if what I was doing was correct. Ms. Oatis had a very quiet yet sensible approach to teaching Writing. Her anchor charts and strategies were freely offered to me, but a lot of the day-to-day instruction and activities were entirely up to me.
Possibly my two best experiences for professional development were not necessarily accomplished within the classroom. The first, was our summer class with Dr. Rutherford on promoting literacy in the classroom. Purposeful reading of texts completely changed my classroom. Dr. Rutherford gave a format for basing our ELA pedagogy. I was able to think about my students' reading and writing more holistically thanks to her guidance. The second best experience for professional development that I had was the curriculum building course for summer school. With the help of Dr. Sweeney, April Love, and Ian Gutgold, and per the suggestion of Camille Lesseig, I was able to help construct a Non-fiction English curriculum for summer school. The curriculum was built using Reading for Information standards as well as Reading for History standards. These two experiences helped me gain a better understanding of teaching English at the secondary level.
non-fiction_english_summer_school_map_.xlsx | |
File Size: | 126 kb |
File Type: | xlsx |