Entrance Slip (Oct 14) - Dancing Teachers Into Being With a Garden

 Teachers can often get caught up with the overwhelming amount of tasks that they need to finish. This includes (but is not limited to): finishing up with evaluations, marking assignments/quizzes/tests, arranging meetings with parents, planning out future lessons, checking up on struggling students, making accommodations for those that need it, creating activities, constructing fair assessments, and developing relationships with their students. It is extremely easy to get caught up in all of the aforementioned things, while failing to provide ourselves time to reflect and absorb our surroundings. A key takeaway from this class has been the Sit In spot activity; paying attention to all of the senses and how they interact with the immediate, surrounding environment. It was pleasing to genuinely acknowledge and think about the five senses and how they were being stimulated in the garden. As humans, every day consists of \ doing so much, with so many objects and organisms surrounding us. We were able to almost freeze time and pay attention to the acute details of our environment. This is a significant aspect of education that I hope to bring into my future classes, in which the students have the opportunities to reflect and embrace life. This is such an underrated aspect of life that people mistakenly ignore, because of their busy schedules. I certainly need to do a better job of this and by implementing it into my classes, I will hopefully encourage students to do the same as well.

The concept of the “grid” and how it is incorporated within many structures of our lives is fascinating. In society, we see examples of grids all the time. The arrangement of houses, classroom seating layouts, the sorting of mobile device apps, graphs, the layout of YouTube, images on Google Search. I think that as a future educator, it will be nice to have such a regimented system in order to transition easier into the teaching profession. Having a “sorting of curriculum, students, resources, timetables and grades into charts and tables” helps to organize and prepare new teachers for their classes. For teaching secondary grade levels, the teacher will have so many students every year that having a rigid system will help immensely. In contrast, this article allowed me to explore how I can “parkour” the grid system. I wonder how I will be able to implement myself into a grid-like system of the school that I will be teaching at and how I can break out of that. Will I have the flexibility to swing out of the grid of schooling? I definitely need to put lots of thought and preparation as to how I will exactly accomplish this.