Professional and Personal Learning Hours

This semester, in the TEAMS Tutoring in Schools course, I opted to take the extra ten hours that were labeled as “professional and personal” learning opportunities literally as I split my learning directly in half and devoted five hours to personal learning and five hours to professional learning. Most of my professional learning was rooted in taking the necessary steps to become a teacher as I had an advising appointment in the education department during my sophomore year in the fall 2017 semester in which I was instructed to return to explore it more in depth during my junior year due to the fact that an internship would take me away from campus during the spring 2018 semester. I decided to take this opportunity to explore the various opportunities available to me. Additionally, for personal learning, I decided to pursue the teaching of American Sign Language to myself.

Professionally, I focused my learning around various meetings and moments when I reached out to academic officials to learn more about what the future had in store for me professionally. I began with a one hour meeting on September 13 with Professor Sharon Edwards in which I went over general questions about how the TEAMS would work for the first couple minutes of the meeting and then focused my questions around a lot of my fears and apprehensions that came with going into the classroom. Her assistance and direction to the book, How to Talk So Kids Can Learn, were incredibly useful for my first day in Ms. Gina Simm’s classroom, even though it still took me a little bit to get comfortable in the room. After asking a couple questions about teacher licensure programs, Professor Edwards directed me to Professor Maloy. I then had a half hour meeting with Professor Maloy on September 24 that centered around mapping out the rest of my college career and examining what my opportunities would be for graduate programs and Professor Maloy and I worked together to build a general skeleton of what the rest of my time at UMass would look like. Subsequently, I spent another half hour working through the map we had created and attempted to fill in some of the blanks. Professor Maloy also directed me to Professor Janis Greve, who was in charge of the STEP program. I then had a one hour meeting with her on October 9 that featured the two of us working together to try to determine what requirements I had already satisfied for the English STEP program and what work I still had to do. This became an instrumental meeting as I worked to figure out my outline for the remaining UMass semesters, including the spring 2019 semester, which I picked classes for shortly after my meeting with Professor Greve.

Beyond UMass-based meetings, however, I also had meetings with the University of Central Florida and Worcester State University, both of which happened over the phone. Each of these meetings lasted for about an hour and they happened on October 22 and December 2, respectively. I sought to explore the education opportunities at UCF because for a large part of the semester, I expected I would be transferring there and I wanted to know how the licensure programs worked at UCF and the steps I would need to take to become a teacher if I graduated from that school. I had the same questions for WSU, except they were much more in the vein of how to become a teacher if I had a degree from UMass, rather than transferring to WSU. This came after the meeting Professors Edwards and Maloy held with the TEAMS course before Thanksgiving to go over some of the licensure programs. Knowing I’d be very unlikely to afford these programs, I decided to look into WSU, which was much closer to home. All in all, I learned I have a lot of work to do to become a teacher, but it all seems very rewarding. Coming into this semester, I was incredibly stressed and very panicked by the idea that I was not going to be able to become a teacher before I graduated. By actually reaching out to resources, though, in meetings that were an hour each and added up to five hours, I was able to learn about the processes and therefore remove the fear associated with them. It helped my mental state and my own sense of clarity to actually have different plans in place for whatever path I decide to pursue.

As for my personal learning, I took the opportunity to learn something I’d always wanted to learn: American Sign Language. We learned a little bit of it when I was kindergarten, but after fifteen years, it had fallen out of my mind, but I did like learning it. There was also a commercial for Kay Jewelers when I was a kid where a husband got his deaf wife two Christmas presents. One was a diamond necklace and the other was the ASL sign for “Merry Christmas.” As someone who loves the holiday season and romance and is easily marketed to, I fell in love with the ad and the idea of learning ASL. After working at Walt Disney World for multiple months and experiencing many deaf customers whom I could not communicate with, I decided I would try to learn ASL. Initially, I reached out to friends who spoke it for help, but when I wound up back at UMass for the semester, I didn’t want to disturb them too much. Little did I know that a week later, I would have motivation to pursue ASL thanks to TEAMS. Over the course of five one hour sessions with a variety of helpful YouTube channels, I developed a small, but slightly functioning knowledge of the language that I will be eager to pursue over the winter break when I have more free time!

I slowed the videos down to 0.25 speed so I could follow along with the specific positioning of the hand of the fingers and genuinely attempt to teach myself through these online educators. I’ve never been good with languages (I’ve taken two years of French and a semester of Latin and I can barely get by with saying “hello”), but I really committed to learning in each hour that I dedicated to ASL. My first hour was rooted around learning the alphabet and I still find myself practicing the ABCs of ASL when I walk around campus, desperate to keep it in my head unlike in kindergarten. My second lesson taught me questions and manners. I learned the five Ws, who, what, when, where, and why, and I also learned how to thank people, say please, ask them for help, and say excuse me, which are crucial for my daily life. My third lesson was about time, including times of day (like morning and night, for example) and other times (weeks, months, etc.). My fourth lesson was about places (including, but not limited to, bathrooms, churches, and stores) and different verbs associated with places (in and out, come and go, etc.). My fifth and final lesson was about family, including parents and children, which would be cool to show off on Christmas! I’m excited to keep exploring the rabbit hole of ASL and to keep practicing what I’ve learned so I don’t forget it! It’s taught me a lot about myself, including the fact that I’m not as inept about languages when I’m genuinely interested and passionate about learning them. I wish UMass would let us learn ASL as a language requirement!

I also want to briefly mention that I missed three and a half tutoring hours at Wildwood on Election Day. I made these up by taking notes in the blue book, which I will attempt to give to Justin when I pass in this essay. I spent one hour and fifty minutes taking notes on cultures and hidden figures in class, one hour and thirty minutes learning about Jane Goodall, and ten minutes learning about Saul Castro. Thank you!

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