Tuesday, August 25, 2009

First Day of School

This is where I completely kiss up to one of my favorite teachers. This semester I'm taking a Language and Literature Class for Small Children at Parkland. Nancy Gaumer is my teacher. I had her last semester for an Infant/Toddler class and I loved her. 

Nancy has a lot of energy in the classroom. She clearly loves teaching potential teachers and is completely in love with little kids. So often I've dealt with teachers who are completely burned out. They make negative off-handed comments or generalizations about their students in front of them. They phone in their classes and really don't inspire much of anything in the classroom. 

Today was our first day in class. Nancy had vases with flowers on the table with bright pieces of material underneath each vase. She began by taking our photos (she's a very visual learner) and then she read us Mrs. Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten.  Afterwards, she talked about the goals for the class, her love of literature and reading with/to kids and talked about why, educationally, putting some emphasis and performance and personality into it is of dire importance in the classroom, particularly for little kids. She also stressed that lap reading was a much more effective teaching tool than group time because it formulates a bond or trust between the small child and the educarer (that's right -- it's jargon). 

Anyway, besides her positive attitude and open door communication with her students, Nancy gets the big picture, so, as a student, I feel like she gets me. I guess there is more bonding to group reading than she thinks. ;-)

"Librarians are my heroes," she gushed to the classroom, and she gave me a great program idea for CARE. 

All in all, it was a great hour and 15 minutes, and I'm so looking forward to going back on Thursday.

1 comment:

makeup_girl said...

There are a few jobs that I always wanted to have. One is a teacher. Another was a librarian. *sigh*

It sounds like you are going to enjoy this semester!