Best and Worst Learning Moments
Best Learning Moment
My greatest learning moment occurred a full year after graduating from high school when I changed my career path into education. Roughly a week after officially changing my major into education, I met with an administrator within Davis School District to talk about life as an educator as well as receiving any additional tips that would help me along the way. When meeting with this administrator he gave me some advice that I’ll never forget, “As an educator, everything we do needs to be revolved around the kids”. This piece of advice stuck with me and is something that I will continue to reflect on throughout my teaching years. As a teacher, we often work long hours with fairly little pay and can get pushed past our breaking point on a weekly basis. However when teaching it’s important to get out of the mindset of how this affects us as teachers, but more into how this affects the students. Teaching in nature is a very selfless job and one that can be very draining and frustrating. However this piece of advice has helped shape me into the educator that I am today, as the majority of my actions revolve around the needs of the students.
Worst Learning Moment
My worst learning moment came from my Senior year at Weber State when I learned about a new testing format for incoming educators called the PPAT. Throughout this process of learning about the PPAT, I became incredibly frustrated and overwhelmed by all of the different obstacles we had to jump through in order to receive our teaching license. When initially learning about the PPAT, I briefly started to wonder if all this work and confusion was worth being able to teach. However, that’s when I started reflecting back to my meeting with the administrator in Davis School District on why we do what we do as teachers. I knew that this wouldn’t be the last time I would have feelings of hopelessness and frustration, but ultimately it shouldn’t be about “me” as the teacher, but more about the kids.
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Looking back on this experience, it allowed me to reflect on why I decided to go into teaching and what it would take in order to become a teacher. While I didn’t necessarily feel this necessary reflection in the moment, this experience was one that would reinforce my decision to go into education and a trial run for tougher things to come.