Reflective Journal #1: Thoughts on first class.

"Teaching is what I want to keep doing". I reached that revelation a week ago after certain experience at work, where I realized that in the most stressful times of my life, entering a classroom and teaching my students has this soothing effect on me. And it was confirmed after I attended the first class of TCHG 504 last Tuesday. I realized that getting together with other teachers and talking about our teaching experiences just motivates me and pushes me more to be the best teacher I could be. Sitting in class and listening to stories that are similar to what I witness and experience in everyday life makes me eager to take the Education and Teaching more seriously, assures me that there are people out there who share the same thoughts, views, and even frustrations of our job, it feels like a support group where we encourage each other and give each others ideas and new perspectives on the teaching process. When we were introduced to the community-based project, the idea hit me instantly. Though it needs some organization and structure, it made made me notice that the more experience I get from teaching teenagers, the more ideas and projects build inside my mind in order to help these teenagers learn better. I also noticed that I'm preoccupied with my work most of the time, honestly I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing!. Also the activity of bringing your student to the class was a very interesting one, because it confirmed that teenagers are the same everywhere, I could see a lot of my students being mentioned during this activity. Teenagers' behavior is universally similar!

In general I was so excited about the class, about seeing old colleagues, and meeting new ones, about the professor who I personally think she's very interesting and will bring a lot of new insights to the class. I'm looking forward to learning about the best effective ways to motivate teenagers to be productive, because I believe that teenagers learn best when they are passionate about the material they're given, our role as educators is to provide them with all the tools necessary so as to make their learning experience interesting, fun and most importantly life-long.