Last night, the MAT faculty gave us a orientation to welcome us, give us a tour of the campus (very important places that we need as grad students), getting to know my fellow cohort mates and get free dinner at the end of the night. (Dinner was Mediterranean food which was very yummy. I love the salad with some kind of dressing and the pita bread with hummus.) In my previous blog, I mentioned that the orientation started at 4:30 pm. I found out that there are 25 people in my cohort. By the way, cohort is a term used for a group of people learning and training in a program from start to finish. I know some medical professions use the cohort model too in training people into the medical field.
I had fun getting to know some people in my cohort. I wasn't able to know everyone just yet. I gotten to know a bit more about three ladies from my table I was at. Shout out to Brenda! She actually was searching students' thoughts on the MAT program at MU and surprisely googled my blog. I believe she is getting endorsed with Early Childhood/Elementary too. There was a lot of info being fed to us so I can't remember everything including the conversations with people.
Another person at my table is someone I actually had met before. I met Tara at Western Oregon University (WOU for short) where we got our BAs. What a small world! She got hers in history. We probably had a few LACC (general) classes together. Maybe a pre-education function since she was interested in teaching high school. I found out now that at that time, she didn't feel like she was ready to teach since she was only a few years older than the oldest high schooler. I am so excited to start this program with her and get to know her better too. We will have a couple classes together.
The MAT program at MU is awesome. We all received a free MU graduate studies messenger bags filled with info we need to know and a free book by Rafe Esquith. I received his Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire book which I actually read from my local library several months ago. I love how he writes about his experiences and I learn from them. But it's nice to get my own copy as a resource book. He has another book out already which I need to check it out from my local library. It is called There are No Shortcuts. Here is his official website: http://www.hobartshakespeareans.org/. Wow, he actually wrote another book called Lightening Their Fires. Wow, two books I need to check out and read.
Here is a background info on Rafe Esquith: He is a well-known Californian teacher in the education world. He taught 5th grade over 20 years at a low-income school. He inspired his students to think outside of the box and believe that they are worth something. Many of his former students are immigrants or children of immigrants. FYI, I am a child of immigrants so I can connect to what his students was feeling and experience a bit. Mr. Esquith actually was a guest speaker at Marylhurst University. Too bad I missed that. Anyways, many of his former students went off to college and probably made this world a better place in their own rights. I hope I can be a type of teacher who inspires her students to continue to learn and grow for life as well as creating future leaders or community people to make this world a better place.
If you spent time talking to me in person or electronically, you can probably can tell how excited I am to start this journey up again. It has been over 10 years ago when I dreamed of becoming a teacher. In my undergrad years, I had some bumps along the way. After graduation from WOU, I gain some real life experiences working with children at my current job as an after school teacher/leader in the after school care program.
My first class is next Tuesday evening, September 27th. The class is on Socio-Political/Social Justice Issues which meets on Tuesday evenings this term. I will learn a lot of stuff. MAT believes in social justice issues since MU was created by nuns who came to Oregon in the mid-1800s to serve the needy people. They realized that education is needed to help them in life so they started a school which came out of the St. Mary's Academy. They move on to create a college so they found land in today's Marylhurst which is south of Lake Oswego and only 15 minutes away from SW Portland.
No comments:
Post a Comment