Introductory Letter Assignment

My name is Josh Gallegos and I am in my fourth year as an undergrad student at Eastern Washington University. I am pursuing a degree in Secondary Education with endorsements in both Social Studies and English. As a teacher candidate I have completed courses involving classroom management strategies and assessment strategies. I have yet to make a lesson plan or teach a lesson plan for an actual classroom of middle school or high school students but I did facilitate the Government 100 Plus Group here at EWU for a year and a half. My duties in this position were to make a lesson plan for each session, with a learning target for each meeting. I had to come up with different strategies on how to go over the material to accommodate for different learning styles and answer questions that students had. So although I have not been in an actual classroom yet, I have had experience being in front of a group of students and teaching.

My weaknesses as a future teacher of English is that I don't feel one hundred percent confident that I can write a paper that is grammatical correct and has no errors. I also have trouble being creative so coming up with different strategies to introduce an idea or topic might be hard. My strengths are my enthusiasm for reading. I love to read and the idea of being able to read a book and to teach a lesson or even a course on the themes, plots, character development, etc. of a book that I love sounds like so much fun. Also my ability to be open minded and except the fact that people interpret literature different will help as a future English teacher. I may have read something and believed it always to mean one thing while I may have a student who interprets it as something completely different.

My goals for this course is to improve my ability to interpret literature differently, meaning, that I can find multiple interpretations for a single passage of literature. Also to be able to effectively teach a lesson on a book and to gain helpful strategies to improve my ability to teach literature to students.