Reflection 1.

I have not begun my service learning officially yet, but I am very excited for the experience. I am volunteering at Educare, which is a daycare center for pre-school aged children. I will be supervising a class of pre-schoolers for an afternoon a week. I recently decided to switch from Speech Pathology into the education field. This was a big jump for me. I had always wanted to go into the medical field growing up. Also, it took my parents a while to warm up to me switching from high paying job associated with a lot of security, to a lower paying less secure job. However, this class and the other education class, Education 1220, that I am currently taking are providing a lot of comfort for me, that I made the right decision switching majors. While I was interested in things we learned in speech pathology, I feel like I  am a whole lot more interested and engaged in my education classes. I am so excited to be able to apply the things I am learning. I love talking about the different strategies for teaching, such as reflective thinking, openmindedness, whole heartedness and how to make the most effective impact on students. Discussions like those strenghten my desire to want to become a teacher and hopefully have a significant impact on students. As we talked about in class, kids spend more hours in school with their peers and teachers than they do, in any other activity, even just being home. I had never thought about what an important role a teacher plays in a student's life, whether that teacher helps change a student's life, or just teaches he or she how to add and subtract, a student often never forgets their teachers. This creates a desire for me to persue teaching even more.