I have always dreamed of being a teacher. I pretended I was a teacher for my little sister and all of my dolls growing up. I didn’t grow up with very much money in my family so we never traveled anywhere. My mom would always tell us, kids, “The only way you will travel the world is through a book.” So we read all of the time. In 6th grade, I had been an aide for the Librarian and would spend my recesses in the library re-shelving books. By the time I graduated from high school, I had been enrolled at ten different schools from kindergarten to my senior year. When I was able to find a position within a school I was able to show the students that no matter what hardships we face in life we could always find a way to learn and grow from them. The best part about being a teacher is that students will remember you for life.
I started working with my children’s school with the after-school program and worked my way up to being an intervention paraprofessional at Elgin Middle School. I supported the ELA department with intervention support. During the first half of the year, I would push into classes and support small groups inside the class. After the holiday break and the new semester started I would change to small group STAAR prep. This gave me a chance to take what the students were learning inside their ELA/R classes and bring it more focused to a small group instead of a whole class. I did this for three years while I attended Austin Community College. Right now I work at Neidig Elementary School as an Early Childhood Literacy Specialist. I work with kindergarten to second grade teaching them the basics of letter sounds all the way up to reading fluency. This will be my second year in the position. This position has given me a chance to see the art of reading from a very basic start. I am currently in my second semester at Texas State University majoring in Education Instruction in ELA/R and Social Studies for grades 4 to 8. My love for reading and history inspired me to enter into this subject and my absolute love for the pre-teen/early teen years made me decide to go with the middle school ages. I love their sarcasm, they want to be a grown-up, but still want to learn and have fun at school.
Hello and welcome to you, Chavon! It is so cool that you have decided to move from being a para to being a certified teacher. Your experiences as a para have informed your learning at TXST in ways you may not even imagine yet. So exciting. Middle school is wonderful.
ReplyDeleteI am extremely excited about the classes I have chosen this semester at TXST. It will be my first semester learning more in depth about what exactly is teaching. Most of my previous classes have just been about a specific topic, but not teaching as a whole. This semester I will be digging deeply into TEKS, lesson plans, and implementing whole units. The knowledge of a para in these matters is quite limited and I am hoping to learn a great deal to be a better teacher than I could have ever hoped to be.
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