I want to teach because I love to see light bulbs go off in kids’ heads. That split second when they realize they finally understand something brings me joy. I want to be able to bring that feeling of understanding to my students every day. I know when I was a middle school student, those times when I had an epiphany about how to write a persuasive paper, structure a sentence, or pronounce a certain word my teacher was there to facilitate those moments. I am going to be teaching Language Arts and Social Studies to middle school students.
          My conception of teaching is that as a teacher, I will give my students the raw knowledge and tools to learn something, and then it is their job to study, do the projects, and the homework I assign in order to facilitate in their further learning of the topic. Learning has to do a lot with how I will teach, but it also has a lot to do with how my students receive the information I give them. When I give my students time to free-write in class, I expect them to utilize that time to learn and absorb what they are doing in that time.
          When I am a teacher, I will have a structured classroom but will make sure it's not boring. I want to incorporate all different types of genres, medias, and cross-disciplinary tools into my lessons. I believe that by incorporating different ways of teaching into my lesson plans, the students will have a better opportunity to grasp the material in different ways. There are all sorts of learners. It is best to teach with multimodality to make sure all of your students absorb the material necessary to move on in the curriculum.
          In order to measure my students’ progress of learning the material, I will provide exit tickets, weekly pop quizzes, and summative end-of-unit tests. I will compare these assessments to the North Carolina Common Core Standards to see if my students are where they need to be for that particular time in the school year. I will also create rubrics from which to grade from when assessing my students essays, projects, and other forms of personal writing. I don’t want to bring any biases when I grade my students’ work, so a rubric to assess writing is the best way around bringing biases to the grading process.
          Throughout this e-portfolio are some examples of the different types of genre pieces I want to have my students complete throughout the school year. Through these different genres, they will be able to learn the fundamentals as well as how to develop their voices as writers. This is my goal for my students: learn the fundamentals and rules of writing but do so in a fun way that helps create a sense of voice and personality in their writing.