Reflection Paper

Everybody has educational barriers and everyone has a specific way to overcome it.There’s always going to be barriers, but I never gave up.

When I attend school for the very first time, I was the only Karen kid in the school. I didn’t know how to communicate with classmates and my teachers, which made it really difficult for me and I was very frustrated. At the same time, it scared me to death and sometimes I even thought about quitting school. I felt relive and very lucky that I had a kind and loving teacher who helped me out with my English. For example, every day when I went to school, my teacher would come talk to me, interacted with me, and asked me to read a story with her, which helped me a lot with improving my English skills such as reading, listening, speaking, and writing. I also used my speaking skill to communicate with my friends. Yet, everything took time even though it took me so many years to learn English, but what I learned from this difficulty was that, all obstacles come for a reason. They either come to destroy you or help you improve and make you a strong person. The lesson that I learned from my first hardship is to never give up and always try my best. I believe that everything is possible if I try

We have learned a lot as a class so far this school year. For me, the reflection assignments have been helping me to stay on top of reading His Word. Lately, we have been talking about covenants whether it's the Noahic Covenant, Sinai Covenant, or even the covenant that God will keep His promise in Genesis 15. The NLT Study Bible and Thirty Questions have helped expand my knowledge on the topics of this reflective essay. Creation, humanity and sin, who is God, and God’s covenant are the four main themes I will go into detail about.

Over the course of the semester, I have been fortunate enough to work with a student who is having difficulties when it comes to reading. My student does not have difficulties when it comes to hearing a word, but rather when he sees a word. My student has definitely benefited from one on one work with me as well as the additional help he’s getting from the reading specialist during their WIN (what I need) time. My student does not like to read because he knows that he is struggling and he is embarrassed about it. When my student goes to his WIN time, he does really well because the instruction is at his level and there are only two other students who are also on the same level there as well. Besides the current intervention, programs I would recommend are Direct Instruction: Reading Mastery, Letter Spacing, Wilson Reading System and the Lindamood program (LiPS).

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

When I was 16 years old I realized I had written a paper about how me and my Nana are different and had forgotten the first paragraph. I do not know how I managed to do that but I need to introduce the ways in which we are different. I like to eat, food is good which means you should a lot of it and often but my Nana is is a big health junkie, she was visiting us and every time we had a meal we would hear why we should not be eating what we are eating and why we should be eating something else. Secondly, stars are in the sky everyone knows that, but how the stars are aligned should not decide how you live your life most people know that, not my Nana she would ask when I was born and then log on to her computer and tell me to watch out because how she believes in ideas that are more out there then what I believe in. Ideas such as, yelling at ice will make it freeze weird or that the Earth is a computer simulation. And now that this part is done I can turn the paper in.

I remember sitting in my first grade classroom and staring at the whiteboard while Mrs. Amen talked. “What if all this church stuff is a lie fooling the world?” I thought and would continue to for a while afterwards. Growing up, I had always assumed I became a Christian when I was 6 years old but now I’m convinced it wasn’t authentic. Everyone else in my church and school was one so I essentially thought, "Why not?" However, I was never convinced of its authenticity, having never felt the presence of the Holy Spirit or the Father’s perfect love. It was in no way my church’s fault but the Holy Spirit waited to show Himself to me. Until then I would tune out every time God being brought up and only saw the Bible as a resource for world history. However, when I was 12, God brought me to my knees and over the years has thoroughly convinced me logically, emotionally, and practically of His existence moreover the Bible.

As I write this paper and look around me, I can’t help but to reminisce in nostalgia and almost choke up in tears. To my right is the family room, an open chamber where I have learned more life lessons than any school I’ve been to. Meanwhile, to my left encompasses the kitchen which holds a wide variety of memories from my life; from birthdays to vegetarian Thanksgiving to Saturday night Taco Bell. The love I have for my home, my sanctuary, the place that has nurtured me from toddlerhood to manhood is unparalleled to any other place in the world. However, what I think makes it the most special is that it’s located in Franklin, and it would devastate me if I moved anywhere else, but unfortunately I did.

I have always been a believer of second chances, wanting to help people who find themselves in difficult situations within the law. To help people get another opportunity, that I firmly believe everyone deserves. Have we not always been taught to learn from our mistakes, and become better people because of them? I simply cannot accept that a few poor decisions can and should define a person for the rest of their life.

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.

At a young age, I have always dealt with internal issues such as anxiety. Art is one way I could let myself become calm, it has always been there for me when I needed it, but it soon became a problem once I was made aware that Islam would not allow my way of coping. As an aspiring artist I was told by my Islamic teachers that drawing images, anything with a soul, is a mockery to Allah and his ability to create! According to them, I was honoring the man-made idols that were worshipped by the people of Madinah eventually leading them astray in the times of prophets, that I would be punished for my sin. Soon after though, I would see the broad perspective of religion and belief. For many years, I have been told that nothing else was the truth, except for Islam. With so many days spent inside my home, four years of being in an Islamic private school, and being fed nothing but traditional Islamic ideals and opinions, I would grow up to have a closed mind to the Liberal American way. I countered their overwhelming claims. I came to understand that I had the power to make my own decisions in life and that I could determine what made me happy, what made me a good person, even if that meant rebelling against the way I was raised and taught to live since birth. This was the toughest decision of my life.

So this is the paper on what I have learned personally through my first semester of college. Throughout the beginning of my first semester I tried to treat it like high school. High school for me was always a breeze the teachers were decent the classes were filled with people I don’t really like but act like I do for the sake of getting through each day, the curriculum was easy, and nothing really stressed me out. College, as I learned was an entirely different monster. The classes were full of people who I didn’t know and who probably wouldn’t bat an eye if I showed up with my hair messed up or my clothes wrinkled. Full of faces that are only there to take notes and pass a test. That was the biggest adjustment, people don’t care about other people. Theyre there for themselves and their own personal agenda is what comes first. The initial feeling of being by myself was weird, it didn’t matter what the person next to me was doing nor did it matter what you were doing. Every choice you made was solely reliant on you. In high school if you pull out your phone the teacher gets onto you and takes it away. In college if you want to waste time on your phone you can, people do it consistently too. I’ve seen people playing games on their laptops, watching soccer games, instant messaging their mom. There is a lot of not paying attention for some people and at the beginning of the year I would occasionally get on Instagram or snapchat instead of paying attention because I still had

In a utopia, everyone is portrayed as an accepted character, with no problems and withdraws holding them back in their “perfect society”. Unfortunately, this is not the world we live in today. Reality sucks. Reality is an unfair society with egotistical individuals who only want to better themselves by making everyone feel worse. These selfish characters do not realize that every individual goes through something completely different than they do. Although, they cannot notice, they wear blinders, expecting people to live up to their standards. The pain they cause... Endless neglection, having to improve yourself, these emotions you have to live up to in order to be accepted. I felt them take control, and there was no way I could escape them. I shut down from everyone, and everything.

Writing has never been one of my strengths. Even in high school, when I took an AP English literature course, I did not enjoy writing papers if need be. Since I did not fancy writing papers, I never developed a systematic writing process. I would write the paper last minute and pray for an A, but college doesn’t work like that. When I came to college, I placed into music classes first so that I could develop those skills, thus leaving my core classes (including English) on the backburner. Although I do not regret this decision, having a two-year gap between English classes made it difficult to readapt. Instead of spending hours practicing instruments and music theory, I faced the challenging task of shifting gears to spend a majority of my time behind my laptop. How was I supposed to manage this new workload?

I don’t think women are truly appreciated for the fierce warriors that they are. I think the downside to my gender is the “period”. I have been plagued with that since I was nine and I can tell you I’m not going to miss it when it’s gone. One experience that I remember particularly growing up was at my high school. A male teacher suggested that math wasn’t for girls and I should go take a economics class and learn to sex something. He didn’t like my response and I was kicked out of class and happy to be away from a narrow-minded misogynistic man. I think one thing that this experience has taught me is that basic respect for people should be given to all equally not just one group.