Reflection Paper

There are multiple reasons I am where I am today and why I’m going where I’m going. I have struggled in school ever since I can remember but without the people that I have had in my life I wouldn’t where I am today. But as I will talk about the teacher have played a huge role in the reason I am able to be where I am today.

“I have told you theses things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” John 14:13. “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your god; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” Isaiah 41:10. Theses are the words that god has spoken. The lord christ has helped with so many things you may not know about. Have you hear of miracles he does the little miracles in life.

I thought I knew pain; I wrong. True pain floods the encompasses a person. The anguish overwhelms every aspect of their lives. I first saw true pain in the eyes of poverty. During my seventh grade year, I had the opportunity to go on my first mission trip. The young, naive version of myself who flew into Haiti never returned, but was replaced with a new, wiser rendition who is determined to change the world.

Before I took this class, I was very inexperienced as a writer and I did not have much knowledge on the different types of essays and stories that we wrote in this class. Intermediate Composition has taught me a ton about how to use a variety of skills and how to greatly improve my writing. In the classes I took during my previous years of high school. We did not have much of a variety while writing essays and we were limited to specific guidelines. Unlike my previous classes, we were able to choose the topics we wrote about in this class, and it allowed me to enjoy my writing more than ever before and I feel that it helped me write better. Some examples of the classes I have taken previous to this class are the standard ninth and tenth grade World Literature and American Literature. I chose to take this class at the end of my sophomore year in high school because I was not very interested in taking a more difficult writing class, and my skills in writing were not as good as I would have liked them to be. So I figured that Intermediate Composition would be the best option for me so I can improve my skills as a writer and still have fun while doing it. We got a lot of time in class to work on every single one of our essays and I believe that doing that was able to relieve a lot of the stress that my Junior year was putting on me. Coming into this class, my skills in grammar was awful and something I really liked about this class was that I was able to prepare for the SAT as

It was on a cold day in January, 2015 when I thought my whole world was going to be flipped upside down. We were living at my grandmother’s house at the time, and in the back of my mind I knew that we were going to move into our own house because that was the plan ever since we sold our old house. With this in mind, I still remember how I felt when my parents came home one night and said, “Our offer on a house was accepted and that we were moving at the end of summer.” I visited this house with them before, but we visited many houses over the past couple years so it sort of came as shock that everything was official. Living at my grandmother’s house was not ideal and it was no walk in the park so I was happy that I was going to have a place my family could call our own again. Although I was excited, I was also nervous and scared because the house is located 45 minutes away from where we currently live. That meant I was going to leave my friends and family and basically everything I’ve ever known.

I sat on a short bus with 10 other kids I barely knew, tired, hungry, and dreading the next week. Shivering in the cool April morning air, I wished I was anywhere else in the world. The beach with my friends for spring break sounded nice or somewhere else warm where my alarm would not wake me up at six every morning. Yet with every mile marker we passed, the more the unsettled feeling in the pit of my gut began to dissipate. Eight hours and a very small dinner later found me unrolling a sleeping bag on a tile floor, grateful simply to sleep. As I closed my eyes that night, I asked God for two things — for the energy to get through the week and for this mission trip to be worth it.

The lessons that I develop follow a specific format that includes challenging, measurable objectives, appropriate pacing for each component of the lesson, appropriate student engagement strategies, activities, materials, pre-assigned groupings, and helpful resources. For example, I implement strategies and activities within lessons in order to provide students with an excited experience while learning. Within my well-structured lessons, I ensured that I included rituals and routines that students were familiar with. I also provided students with appropriate responses if students had a misconception about the current topic in order to avoid students feeling of embarrassment or frustration. For instance, during a phonics lesson, a student wrote the word "dat" instead of the word "bat." When seeing the misconception of letter reversals, I made the comment to be sure of the direction of their written letters and to remember that "b has a belly and d wears a diaper." Seeing that this misconception was evident, I provided students with a visual of these letters on the whiteboard. Following all lessons that I teach, I reflect upon my practices and continuously ask my supervising practitioner how the previous lesson went and I state what I feel as though I could improve, as I have the tendency to grasp when I make mistakes or could provide clarification for students. I also reflect on my teaching performance when watching recorded videos and listening to voice recordings of my

There are 7 billion people living on this planet, and I can say that I have something in common with all of them. We have all faced challenges that have made us who we are today. For me, I have dealt with the challenge of my family’s coming to America when I was very young, with no English skills.My family and I come to the US from a refugee camp in Thailand when I was 10. My parents had fled Burma to the camp 14 years before and started their family there. I am the oldest of 6 kids - 4 of whom were born in the camp. As soon as we got on the plane, I could tell that our journey was going to be a challenge. My parents and I could not understand anything that was said, and I was confused by all the new and different food that we were served. When we finally arrived in Charlotte, NC after three days of traveling, nothing was familiar. Even the names of streets were different. I was terrified to start a new school. As it turned out, my first day was harder than I thought. I felt sad and alone and wanted to cry all day because I did not understand what my teachers or peers were saying. Every day I wanted badly to understand what other people were talking about. I spoke only Karen and Karenni at home and English was a very strange, weird, and difficult language to learn. I was placed in an ESL class but it was not very helpful and I was only able to take it for one year. I realized quickly that I would need to work hard outside of school to learn the English that I wanted to

Walking back home I would look around me people eating, working, going home to sleep and wake up to do it again the next day. It seems like people became robots letting life go by. Is this what we live for? This was a question that came up often in my mind during high school. I grew up in a Christian community, but it felt like I was being forced to go to church. Years later, through experiences in school and life in general, I was able to find out what to believe and why. I am a Christian because of personal life experiences and rational arguments for the existence of God.

I remember where it all started; I sat on the guard stand of an empty pool with a nagging mother texting my phone and time to kill. It was the summer before my senior year, the summer before I would make the most important decision of my life so far. I stared down at the blank list of schools in front of me; where to start? I visited a few campuses, and my mother put a few bugs in my ear, one for her alma mater, and the other for two historically black schools (HBCUs). I wrote the first down, placing it low on my list, but there was hesitation with the other two. My entire academic career have been in predominantly white environments; how would I navigate a majority black space?

I attended an awareness seminar of Syria, on Thursday, September 21, 2017 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., however, I stayed after to speak to several guest speakers, and didn’t leave until almost 10:00 p.m. It was held at the Santa Clara County Government Center located at 70 West Hedding Street, Isaac Newton Auditorium, #114, San Jose, California 95110. Parking is only for state employees between 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. I was able to park without getting a ticket, because it was after 6:00 p.m. This is my third day volunteering for the San Jose Peace & Justice Center, in San Jose, California. Learning about Syria and the people made me more aware of their culture, globally.

Looking in the mirror at the actual physical presentation of myself, I investigated what other people view when they looked upon me. At that moment, I began to realize what the features are interpreted as. My hair is pulled up and tight, various people have suspected military, but I have never been enlisted. My glasses and crooked teeth would suggest that my parents were low income, no corrective surgery or braces for me. My body image would be identified, instantly by women, as having children and I do have two sons. After one eight-pound boy and the other almost ten-pound baby my body did not return to its original dimensions, there was no weight trainer or nutritionist for me. My calloused hands will tell anyone that I am a blue-collar worker and the ring on my left tells them that I am married. Progressing through college and beyond will be my way out of the shell that society has created me in, it will be my golden door to freedom.

My mother does genology for my family so I know that I am mostly a mix of African, Native American and not enough European to really think about. I look like a normal African-American girl and most people I come in contact with assume the same thing. To define myself without race I would say I am invested in the betterment of other peoples lives and performing in front of an audience. As a black woman I am affected mostly in my major, theatre, because being black is a factor in whether or not I am cast in certain roles. Personally it has been a rollercoaster going to predominately white-schools and still finding a way to love and appreiciate my blackness. I’m reminded of my race daily when I have to mix my foundations to find a shade that isn’t offered or when my theatre professors suggest I do a monologue from “A Raisin in the Sun’ and as of recently when I look at the news I am affected by the fact that the injustice in the world based on race could happen to me or a loved one in a heartbeat.

Reflecting on the past two terms in school, I would constantly find myself preparing and delivering a lesson which I felt were missing something. I was constantly asking my mentor teachers how I could have better differentiated lessons, especially at senior level. I believe on completing this assignment I have discovered three extremely beneficial frameworks which will improve my lessons and I believe develop a flexible curriculum which allows differentiation for all students to develop their learning capacity and engage them throughout the lesson.

Going into this term, I wasn’t sure what to expect. My initial plan did not include taking this course this summer. Somehow, Troy ended up changing the schedule and it worked out for me. At least, I thought it was going to work out for me. This term has been very interesting. The classes that I took are PSY 6645 Evaluation and Assessment and CP 6642 Group Dynamics. This paper is going to be about my experience in PSY 6645. I’m going to discuss concepts that were new to me, experiences that caused me to think differently, if I feel as if this course is meaningful, and what can be applied to my professional practice.