PGP - week 2 reflections

I consider myself very lucky to be very passionate about my profession, teaching, and what I teach, French. I say this because during my years as an undergraduate student I at first thought my passion was business, but after a couple of years that “passion” or as I reflect back on that now, that “interest” switched to political science. It was not until my last semester of undergraduate studies that I find out what it was to be PASSIONATE about something.

While writing my undergraduate thesis about the political conflicts in the Middle East, a friend encouraged me to join her in taking a beginner French class 2 evenings per week.I was reluctant at first but I’m glad that I decided to join her because that beginner French class totally changed my life. After the first week of French classes I found that I had discovered my true PASSION. This passion is for the French language and culture. After graduating with a degree in Political Science I found work as an Administrative Assistant in an office in downtown Chicago, (a degree in Political Science doesn’t lead to many glamorous job offers), I quickly learned that working in an office and in the world of business, (a commodities trading firm), was definitely not for me.

Consequently I did a lot of reflecting about my future professional plans during my first year out of college. I kept on studying French in the evenings and during this time it occurred to me that I had at one time in my life, thought about becoming a teacher. After attending a few open houses at teacher colleges in Chicago to find out more about a career in Education, I quickly made the decision to combine two passions: French and teaching. It just felt so right and so good when I finally came to this decision. I quickly became more and more passionate about education for every class that I took at the School of Education at DePaul.

My apologies for being so long- winded about my professional passions but I didn’t discover these passions until my late 20s, which I consider late, but I consider myself to be very fortunate as I know that there are many professionals who work in a field for which they have no passion. It must be a horrible to have to work at a job for which one feels no passion.

As for my unique personal qualities, I am not only a speaker of French and a true Francophile, I am bilingual Swedish/English. My mother was Swedish and I happened to spend a lot of my summers visiting my family in Sweden during the summer. As an adult I chose to attend the University of Stockholm mainly for financial reasons, (tuition free), but also because I thought it would be interesting and challenging to attend a school in another country. I've always enjoyed a challenge and when I make up my mind to do something, I always follow through and pursue it. I think this is important to model this to my students.

During my undergraduate years I was fortunate enough to be able do a lot of travelling, mostly in Europe but also in Indonesia for 1 month. I have now taught and worked in Singapore for 9 years, which by the way, is a great travel base. As a result I have had even more opportunities to travel and experience many cultures and countries all over Asia, Australia and New Zealand. These experiences have only enhanced my personal knowledge and made me the person I am today. Consequently the things I saw, experienced, heard and tasted in my overseas experiences have taught me much more than any class or textbook. These unique experiences and knowledge are what I bring to my classes. I find that I can personalize the lesson more or add an extra fact or two because I have personally experienced it or been to the place. As a student I remember listening to my teachers tell their personal stories and experiences in class. These are the things I tended to remember more of than what I read in the textbook, for example.

These past few years my school has been preparing to implement a one-to-one laptop program. At the same time I found myself attending more and more professional development workshops and conferences to learn more about technological tools that can help me to teach French in a way that will help my students to learn it in a fun, hands-on and more realistic manner. I felt so passionate about integrating technology into my curriculum that I even volunteered to serve on my school’s laptop committee. Without realizing it, during these past few years of teaching French I had found yet another passion: educational technology.

In order to foster my most recent passion, that of educational technology, I felt it necessary to educate myself more on the tech tools that are available to educators. Hence my decision to pursue the Master’s in Educational Technology at MSU.

Now that I have completed my second week of the MAET program I can honestly say that my goals for this summer have not changed. I came to the MAET program hoping to learn about a lot of on-line tools and their uses, and this is exactly what I’m doing. I’m excited because I can see uses for me and my students in my classroom, however, as I stated in last week’s blog post, I still need to get used to using them and push myself to integrate these tools on a daily basis in my classroom.

I also need to become more comfortable with the TPACK framework as I still do not feel that I have a full understanding of it. For the remainder of the summer program I would also like to continue to reflect on my teaching and continue to investigate tools that I feel might help to streamline my work flow as well as that of my students. For example, this week I read a blog post from a teacher who does a very similar activity/lesson with his Latin students as I do with my students, however he uses Google Wave to give his students immediate and real-time feedback as they write. I have never worked with Google Wave so one thing I would like to accomplish for next week is to investigate Google Wave to see if this is a tool which I can use in my classroom next year.

That is all for now as my brain is fried. Désolée! (sorry)