Importance Of Secondary Speech And English Education

As a child I watched my single mother give her heart to the 24 students in her inner city kindergarten class. She was a mother to them all, and I was always so jealous of the time other children got to spend with my mommy!! She was a shining example of what it meant to love what you do! She was the epitome of hard-work! She was the most dedicated person I knew! She was my role model, and despite vowing that I would never be a teacher, I learned valuable lessons from watching her as we set up her classroom or worked before and after school. These lessons of loving what you do, working hard and being dedicated helped me achieve success in elementary, middle and high school, but when I went to college I had to decide “what I wanted to be when …show more content…
I chose to study Secondary Speech and English Education because it allowed me to use some of the skills I learned in my acting classes as I developed my speaking skills further. I loved everything about my speech classes!! I was able to learn more about how to speak effectively to any audience about any topic which helped me gain a deeper understanding of the content in my educational theory and English courses. I was alive with learning, and during the next two years I soaked up everything I could! I found my passion! I found my calling! I found MYSELF! I found out why my mother gave her heart to this profession, and I knew I needed to do the …show more content…
I headed south from Indiana when I discovered there were not enough teaching positions. I took a leap of faith! I moved to Georgia without anyone, and I landed where I was meant to be!! From the first moment I stepped foot on campus I knew I was home! The professional learning and teaching environment at North Gwinnett, which I have had the honor of contributing to, has shaped who I am as a teacher. I have learned from my professional learning communities and contributed ideas to connect content to the real world, and literature to students’ lives in new, innovative ways. Lessons on Dante’s Inferno were infused with connections to the allegorical creations of students’ own infernos. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible became a trial to find justice for the people of Salem who were wronged by the Witch Trials of 1692. Tim O’Brian’s The Things They Carried became a look at what students carry with them and how we can let those “things” go to find personal peace. Vocabulary and grammar lessons shifted to use rules more inclusively in writing as we created cross curricular lessons which had students incorporate the vocab words and grammar lessons in their essays. The development of these lessons took years! Hours! Summers! And I LOVED EVERY minute of it!! Through the supportive collaborative PLCs, I found the courage to earn advanced degrees along with awards (Kennesaw State University Scholar 2014) as well as respect