Tag: 23-A1

Technology in this day and age is fascinating when we compare it to technology that existed decades ago, which would now be the early to late 2000s (fascinating how quickly time can go on). I remeber being a kid and some of the first interactions with technology that I had was the television. I still remember the feeling of watching a show or a movie and not having a pause button, so you would wait for a commercial to come on or run in the one scene that didn’t really interest you for some more food, a bathroom break, or something to drink. Nowadays, I watch how my siblings press pause or exist a movie without finishing it, they put on movies as background noise, something so it is not quiet, and something that since they are bored, they can have something to entertain themselves with. We have gotten to a point where cinema is simply there, and it begs the question to how the stories are formed and whether they truly have a strong emotional importance anymore on its audience. As a kid I remember movies such as WallE, Bolt, The Princess and the Frog, El Dorado, Treasure Planet, Orignal Marvel Movies, and many others (some movies may have been bad in those days looking back on it, definetely not ones I mentioned on the list but others, but they were still simple stories and sometimes goofy with enjoyable scenes). I remember scenes in bolt that made me learn the value of friends, family, and especially, an incredible amount of love towards my dog. (the scence still make me cry 15 years later).

Movies like these truly have left a memorable impression on me for years, and it has helped allow me to learn a lot of things regarding relationships. I believe that the reason I have brought this up is because of the lack of good storytelling, or the over abundance of it nowadays, where the quantity of films has definetely skyrocketed, but the quality has plumeted a lot. With streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and a multitude more that I will not list here, everyone has access to handfuls of tv shows, movies, short films, etc., but I feel like the magic of movies and films has died off a lot. Whenever I watch new movies or tv shows, I typically no longer respond much unless the piece of media was great. I typically feel like this now.

There have been a few films that came out this past year that were exceptionally well made and fun to watch such as Glass Onion, Avatar: Way of the Water, and of course, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. These movies were incredibly good and fun movies to watch and it showed the beauty of cinema. Another comment to make would be that there were 3 different Pinnochio movies this year, the only truly mentionable one would be the one by Guillermo Del Toro. Good storytelling is incredibly important to feel a connection with whatever is going on screen. I really enjoyed the Puss in Boots 2 movie mainly because of how well the story ran through, the emotional importance that was felt throughout the whole movie. (Spoilers ahead, a bit). Puss in Boots deals with Puss and his grapple on his mortality and the true potential that he could die. Every action leads to a consequence and it moves the story forward naturally instead of simply moving the movie ahead because it needs to. Why am I writing about movies and how does it deal with anything in education and with people? Thats a good question.

When we are thinking of the effect that movies have on us as people, and how it can move us emotionally, movies that are no longer made with passion and good story telling has an effect on our lives. We are surrounded by a lot of information in todays age, and by having so much, we begin to see the world and all this information as quantity over quality. Movies that taught morals and good qualities of life are now often missed being shown in movies and media, which does have an impact on how students think and live their life. Our minds and the way we think is impacted by the information that we are continually taking in, so if there is bad media, or at least no longer great media, then the quality of our emotions and thoughts may drop. Also, how could you not enjoy Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion

In the field of education, I feel like one thing we should focus on is the importance of good storytelling and connection with our ideas and emotions. It is probably my bias coming from a person that spent 4 years in theater, but it was a wonderful experience where you could truly connect with ideas that were out there and connect with other students. Theater really allows for fun and creativity, and I believe we can implement that in classrooms as well, at least that fun feeling of learning and participating in class. By building strong creativity in class and in life, we get fun movies and media that correlate with students to truly enjoy and grow in this wave of information. We want to focus on quality to our students, and reflecting on these movies, us teachers are somewhat like directors. We can help guide students and work with them, but it is also up to the student to provide good “acting”. A good director has a huge impact on whether the movie is good or not, and I do believe teachers should focus on quality and relationships, building up emotions, just as these movies do.

There’s always so much excitement in the lead up to the end of Fall Semester. Sure, there’s plenty of stress from completing last minute projects and studying, but the anticipation of the winter holidays has a way of carrying students through to the end. Because of the upcoming Christmas season, my housemates and I decided to do a Secret Santa gift exchange on Friday night of Dead Week.

We all settled into the living room and took turns guessing and opening our gifts. Two of the gifts had fragrances: body wash and a lavender heating/cooling stress pad (this will be important later). So, the four of us are chatting it up in our living room when Lauren, the person who got the lavender pad, said, “Ooo it’s scented!” prompting my other housemate, Cassie, to come up and smell it. After sniffing it two or three times, my housemate declared, “I don’t smell anything.” Another important sidenote is that Cassie had been sick the past two weeks, but we’d all said it was “just a cold.” Anywho, Lauren commanded Cassie to go take a covid test. Fifteen minutes later, Cassie looked at her test and her eyes become the size of saucers. In a hushed voice she stated, “It’s positive.”

Having known Cassie since high school, I played it off saying, “Yeah, right,” since we’d all been joking around. Cassie then held up the test to show us that it was indeed positive. Lauren yelled, “Go to your room now!” while Makena and I scrambled around the house looking for masks, other tests, and standard cleaning products, like that scene in Monsters Inc.

After placing Cassie in quarantine, Lauren, Makena, and I went to Campus Safety to get Covid tests. We got home and after testing negative, isolated ourselves all weekend. Come Tuesday night, I was beginning to lose all motivation to complete my last three take home exams. So, I changed my playlist from the Piano Guys to random throwbacks from the early 2000s. The first song that played was Tonight Tonight by Hot Chelle Rae.

I turned the volume up all the way and started having an Emergency Dance Party that spread into the hallway. I set my Bluetooth speaker right outside Cassie’s door and Makena and I started dancing and singing at the top of our lungs. Eventually, we moved to the kitchen and Lauren started making pancakes (just because). By the time Winter Break started Thursday afternoon, everyone had completed the last of their finals and Cassie remained the only one of us to have tested positive.

As a senior in high school, I thought I wanted to be a nurse. I then realized that certain aspects of nursing school would not be a good fit for me. I took a class called Christian call where I got to help in a Pre-K classroom. I loved it and knew I wanted to be a teacher! As a freshman at community college, I knew this was because I loved being with kids. That following summer my mom told me to look up alternative options because she didn’t think that teaching would be a good fit for me. I saw Child Life Specialist and did a lot of research on the field and what steps I needed to take to become certified. You can have a Bachelor’s in anything as long as you meet the requirements for 10 specified courses, have completed a Practicum at a hospital, and a 600-hour Internship. Then you will have to take a test to be certified, similar to NCLEX for nurses. Child Life Specialists are individuals that work alongside hospitalized children to help reduce stress, anxiety, and trauma by educating patients about their bodies and procedures through medical play therapy. I’ll have plenty of opportunities to distract kids with bubbles. It won’t be all sunshine and rainbows. I will also navigate families and kids through grief and loss or even abuse and trauma. I feel super excited to have found a profession that matches my interests, passions, personality, and work style. This profession is not commonly known and is incredibly competitive. I decided last spring to not pursue licensure and won’t be going into my MAT year. I will instead get a M.S. in Child Life after graduation. I didn’t seriously commit to this profession until last March/April. In this past month I’ve applied to 4 programs and am waiting to hear back. I have attached 2 Tiktoks, 1 is how I’m feeling going into the profession and the schooling and the other is a sneak peek of what my day would look like as a future Certified Child Life Specialist.

@barstoolsports

Not the scream 💀 @Barstool Outdoors (Via:MD_spirit/ig)

♬ original sound – Barstool Sports

@mmbiz

IV Medical Play with a child life specialist. This usually takes 20 minutes or so with a patient. I give as many choices to them as possible and let them be in control. Answer any questions they have and clarify any misconceptions. Not enough time in this video to go fully in depth LOL! #medicalplay #childlifespecialist #childlife #ccls #pediatrics

♬ Monsters, Inc – Gustav Lundgren & Unit

Hello, my name is Haley Vick, and while I am not quite a teacher, I have a pretty good idea of what the days may feel like during the week. I cannot speak for everyone, but I thought I would share how these days, I imagine, will make me feel.

Monday:

Tuesdays:

Wednesday:

Thursdays:

It is almost Friday! These next two days got nothing on us.

FRIDAYS:

I hope you enjoyed how I feel about the weekdays, in GIF form.

This is a condensed explanation of my journey from almost dropping out of high school to being a few months away from earning my Bachelors degree.
Also, have a chill RHCP song.

Hello all, my name is Chandler M. and I’ve been in school for the last 20 years of my life. Having earned an associates and now on my final year of work towards my bachelors degree in education, with hopes to join the PACE program immediately after graduation, I have honed my life in most ways towards the benefit of my school work through years of struggle and determination. Though I have learned to succeed at UP, it wasn’t until years of mistakes under my belt before I began to take my schooling seriously.
At first, I didn’t much care for school and truly sat through it as that was what was expected of me. My IEP kept me barely above water, and I severely struggled with turning in my work, and don’t even get me started on the amount of work I would do, and then never turn in. This became a downward spiral for me when I was in middle school and continued throughout high school until the very end of my sophomore year. At this point, I felt that “I would just go to a state school with my friends, right?” Needless to say, my GPA at the time wouldn’t have allowed for this. This was the year that I was told that I wouldn’t be allowed to go to any college or university because of my grades unless I stepped back and took a serious change towards my education by my school counselor.
This was world-shattering to my high school self. I knew that I wasn’t giving my all towards school, but no one had vocalized the amount of damage I was doing to my future prospects until this point. That’s when I decided that I would give school my absolute highest effort if not for my instant benefit, the benefit of my future.
I began to push myself academically and give my 110% towards school in all aspects. I would arrive early, I would leave late from asking questions, and if I wasn’t clear on something I would stay upwards of 2 hours after school ended asking different teachers for guidance if they would have me. My grades began to reflect these changes in behavior, and my name started showing up in the quarterly honor roll list in the hall, then I aced my language class and was allowed the opportunity to go to Japan with a few of my classmates including two of my closest friends today.

Trying to find an interesting video on where I had my week-long homestay, I ran into this one which shows several of the locations and people I met myself on my trip there in high school.

The experience of traveling to another country for the first time was life-changing to say the least. I met amazing people, ate great food, and made a lot of memories. But one of the most important things that happened on that trip was meeting a member of the JET program, which is for education majors from other countries to come to Japan to teach for a stretch of time in a professional setting. At the time I was entirely mesmerized by this concept. Going to another country and living there? Teaching others English? It seemed so interesting to me, I was awestruck by its mere existence, and I wanted desperately to join it. This was my initial push towards bringing my grades up, and this allowed me to bring my GPA up high enough to seriously consider college.

At first I thought about going to OSU with my classmates, but I was unsure in myself if I could truly keep up my forward momentum academically. After all, it was only my second year of being able to pass all of my classes instead of only
2-3/6. With this in mind I looked towards community college and settled on attending at Portland Community College, the “Largest Community College in Oregon”.

Community college was a whole other beast compared to high school, and I knew this heading in. At the beginning of my attendance here I wasn’t used to acting on my own, and time management wasn’t something that I had a complete grasp on thus far. However, over my 3 year attendance here, I learned a lot about several concepts and topics that I had interest in, and met many wonderful and extremely supportive professors, including the professor of my only education courses, who I had for 3 terms in a row. I learned a lot about education here, and a few life lessons as well.
One such life lesson is knowing how to manage my time. When I came in, I was working full time, and going to school full time. I would stay up until 4 am most days and manage to wake up just in time for my 10am classes. I was truly burning the candle at both ends, to nobody’s benefit. I was coming in late to class, I was calling out of work because I couldn’t stay awake long enough to drive.

It was at this point that I was forced to work less with my introduction to having to travel to 2 campuses for class on the same day, with a 30 minute drive on a good day in between. The Rock Creek and Sylvania campuses are both beautiful and yet completely different from one another in the needs they require to attend.

Sylvania is the main campus and has an extensive amount of parking, and everything is very close together, a wonderful use of space, although be it slightly confusing to get around. Rock creek however, which was over 35 minutes from Sylvania, thus bringing my commute every day up to over an hour from home, is very spaced out, and has large stretches of lawn between the different buildings that classes are held. This was not something that I was used to, and had to change how I thought about time in order to arrive to places on time, and prepared for class to start before the class started.

This commute, and struggle with timing forced my hand. I had to cut something out, but what? How was I going to be able to afford driving to school, taking my courses, completing assignments, and work all in the same day? The answer? I didn’t.
At this point, I stopped driving to both campuses, I began to use the shuttle system that ran like clockwork between Sylvania and Rock Creek, I learned the absolute limit as to how long I could spend my time studying and reading and still be able to just make it to the bus stop in time. I learned when the the gates to the campus opened so I could spend more time before class completing assignments and finishing assigned readings, and I learned when the last bus ran back to Sylvania to spend the most of my time completing my course work. I became methodical, working like a machine to keep myself afloat.

At this point, I had only one goal in mind, get my degree, and move on. I couldn’t think of anything else more important to me than simply pursuing education even further. I had some set backs, I thought I wouldn’t be able to handle it at some points, or that I might break. But I continued onward with the hope of someday becoming a teacher. Throughout this time, I managed to spend at least some amount of time out of every school year helping out in one of the local schools to my area. Sometimes I would simply observe, sometimes I would interview them for an assignment, and sometimes I simply helped print out papers and cut out materials. But through these experiences I learned lessons in classroom management, resource management, had ideas for future lessons, and figured out the grade range I would feel most comfortable teaching.

On my 4th year out of high school I began to go to UP. This was a big deal for my family, as the last 3 generations on either side never went through college. Since then, I have continued to give everything I have in school. I start assignments the day I receive them when possible, and ask (sometimes too many) questions. Though sometimes it seems like everything is getting a little shaky, I have a wonderful group of friends and family who are there to support me. As well as excellent colleagues who push me to achieve greater goals.

With that being said, I’m nearing the end of my 20 year educational journey, and am excited to see what the future has in store for me. I have come a long way, and owe it all to a lot of different people. I hope to graduate this spring, and I know if I keep track of my time, keep a level head, and finish my assignments early, I will be well on my way to turn my educational career, into a teaching career.

Hello! My name is Nicole Pagtakhan and I like saving memories, so this first post will be about me as a student and things I’ll want to look back on or might want to use when I’m a teacher!

Favorite song at the moment…

Field experience!

• Ockley Green | Mr. Toole’s math 6th grade
• Astor Elementary | Miss Jessica’s 4th & 5th grade
• Terra Linda Elementary | Mrs. Craft’s 3rd grade, Mrs. Piper’s 2nd grade, Mrs. Westeyn’s 2nd grade, Mrs. Taefy-Cross’s 3rd grade

Quotes from some students (& my thoughts)

“Your drawings are trash, have you seen my comic book?”

– 6th grader

He opened up a binder full of hand-drawn comic books, and I was so impressed! This was on my first day too :))

“Is that Rihanna?”

– 6th grader

The teacher likes using celebrities and animals in his mood meter check-in. It was Beyonce.

“Can I teach you how to tap dance?”

– 3rd grader

I didn’t understand the pattern for a while and she looked frustrated while I was figuring it out HAHA I’m still a learner too!

*Explaining Rainbow Friends on Roblox to me because they were trying to recreate it for me to ‘play’*

– at least two 2nd graders at the same time

I hadn’t heard of it before and I’d been playing a lot of games on Roblox with friends so this piqued my interest

“You play Roblox?!”

– 2nd grader

It’s SO funny when they find out I play video games, they’re so surprised!

*future classroom inspiration*

@themissrproject2.0

How the hypes began? Daily age appropriate advice and affirmations for my 5th/7th graders. This is #sel #socialemotionallearning #growthmindset #class #students #parents #wholesome

♬ You Found Me – Instrumental Pop Songs

Thanks for reading my post!

Well, winter break came and went much too quick. With student teaching starting up on January 3rd, I had to get back from my adventures quick. My adventures all started with a day and a half trip at home. This trip was hallmarked by the swearing in of my brother to become a Sheriff’s deputy. I was glad to finally be there while he was sworn in because I joked with him that he looked like Paul Blart during the police academy.

Next, I was off to Indiana to visit my fiancé and her family. An exciting trip as we were planning to go to Canada to visit her family. I had never been so it was very exciting for me to be able to travel up north. The drive was about 10 hours, but well worth the trek. After originally planning to be there for four days, the looming impact of winter storm Elliot forced us to drive home two days early.

My fiancé and had planned on traveling to my hometown (Petaluma, Ca) on Christmas Eve morning to spend the holidays with my family. However, thanks to the aforementioned storm, our flight got cancelled and forced us to rebook to Monday the 26th. On the morning of the 26th we arrived at the airport at 4 am and were greeted with an infinitely long customer service line and all flights cancelled from Southwest. After 3.5 hours of waiting for customer service we were reimbursed our flight and had to book with another airlines.

@rubin_allergy

Have you been affected by this? It has been a disaster lately trying to fly.

♬ Epic Emotional – AShamaluevMusic

We finally were able to make it to California and spend time with my family for the holidays. The five days were spent with family as much as possible. Filled with memories, good food, smiles, and lots of love. A bittersweet time as my grandpa is quickly losing a battle to dementia. Family has always been a priority for me so spending the sweet moments around the holidays with them meant a lot to me. Definitely a holiday season that I will never forget.

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A post shared by Petaluma California (@petaluma_locals)

My winter break ended much how it had been in the middle with delayed flights. I had originally planned to be back in Portland at 9 pm the night before I had to go teach. But, Alaska Airlines had other plans for me. My plane was delayed from taking of until 1:30 am, eventually making it home by 3 am. With myself being the diligently planned person, I was up until 4:30 am preparing slides for my students. At 7 am, my power nap was over and it was back to the real world.

My break was jam-packed, and I am excited for the adventures that lie ahead.