What are you passionate about with regard to learning and why?
When it comes to learning, what I am the most passionate about is the inspiration and motivation that it takes for individuals to be empowered to learn about their own interests. For example, what makes some students want to set goals and improve and what keeps students from improving and making no growth? What makes it okay in the student's mind to be stagnate and what drives the learners that never wants to stop being curious and seeking more and more goals and more answers to their never-ending, curios about life, questions? This passion started a long time ago when I became curious about people and how they worked and operated and why they made choices that they made. My own curiosity of what made people tick started when people watching in San Francisco and at airports across the country and around the world. Currently, I teach at an elementary school that is an AVID site, and I have been to two summer institute training's and am realizing how motivational it can be for positive reinforcement when your peers and teachers cheer for you and praise you for your hard work and a job well done. By being recognized in a public way, by peers, it inspires and motivates those around them to strive, behave more positively and want to earn their own acknowledgements. As a Reading Specialist, I am surrounded by students that are unmotivated to do something that is not a strength to them. Most students are at least two years below grade level and have struggled most of their academic career when it comes to phonics and fluent reading, let alone comprehension by the time they come to me. My role is mostly a cheerleader, as someone that encourages small efforts and improvements on any level, to build up their self esteem and help them to believe in themselves and see their very clear weaknesses as a strength. I have been on a personal journey in the past year in believing in me and diminishing fears and striving to be the person that I want to be, instead of the person that I always just believed that I was, mostly because of outside sources. On this journey I have realized that I can tell my brain what I am and it will believe it as the truth. With a growth mindset and some honed in visualization practices I can get my brain to believe that I don't have a fear of heights because fear and excitement build the same chemical output in your body that I can feel the fear and tell myself that it is excitement. This passion has lead me to read book after book and watch Youtube.com videos and Ted Talks until my eyes burn, to see how to change one's sub conscience belief's and transform my life into the life that I want instead of the life I was living, just going through the motions. When it comes to my students, I want to figure each and every one of them out to see what makes them tick. I want to change their mindset and belief's in themselves and help them realize that their strengths are their biggest assets, but finding balance in their weaknesses can get them to their desired destinations in life . I want them to know that they "...are available for more good than they have ever experienced, realized or imagined before." (The Secret) By dreaming big, you can transfer yourself into that parallel reality and have the future you have always fantasized about.
1 Comment
Jennifer Perkins
9/3/2018 06:12:51 pm
I love your passion for teaching! I related to wanting to know how individual students tick. I agree that it is so important to look at each student as a unique individual that we can help succeed. I am so impressed with your passion for growth and development individually and as a teacher!
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Author: Monica D KnechtI am a teacher in NVUSD. It is my 12th year teaching and currently working as a TOSA as a Reading Specialist. Archives
November 2018
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Photo used under Creative Commons from HeinzDS