If I had been asked my senior year of high school where I pictured myself in five years, I would have told you that I would be living in Nashville, TN, working at HarperCollins Publishers in their Christian publishing branch. I have always had a love for reading and writing and knew that I wanted those pieces of myself to be a part of my future career, but I didn’t realize how vastly the Lord would work in my life and change my heart over the course of five years. I began my college career at Northeast Alabama Community College, and because of my experience at NACC, I gained valuable relationships with people who encouraged me to chase after everything I wanted out of life. In 2020, I transferred to Jacksonville State University. After a summer of prayer, I had decided that moving to Nashville, TN was too far away for a small-town girl who wanted to be close to family, and I knew in my heart that teaching was a calling that I had been ignoring for a long time. Thus, I changed my major and truly began the chase for those dreams. Once I met my teachers, built lifelong friendships, and gained experience in the high school classroom, I knew the passion and peace I felt could no longer be denied, and my fate was sealed. I was going to be an English teacher. Thanks to my family, NACC’s faculty, and JSU’s faculty, I truly discovered what I wanted out of life, and the breath of relief that accompanies that discovery cannot be surpassed.
Recently, I decided to register for the JSU Symposium, which was a wonderful opportunity to represent the Secondary Education Department. The project I presented was the data I had collected from my Impact Study the previous fall. I presented my data from my learning segment on Elegiac Writing. During this segment, I taught the students how to write an elegy over the course of three days. The students had just recently finished reading the play The Crucible and making connections with John Proctor, the main character that dies at the end of the story (I apologize for any spoilers). His death was rather controversial, and I knew this was not the outcome the students were hoping for, so I decided we were going to have a funeral for John Proctor. I began my pre-assessment by assigning the students a four-line elegy on a topic such as a hole in their favorite pair of jeans or a melted popsicle. The students were to meet the same three standards for the pre- and post-assessment, which was a ten-line elegy about John Proctor. By the end of this assignment, I was able to assess my students progress from the assessments and gather how well they grasped the content. I chose three focus students out of the twenty-three in the class and compared the whole-class to the individual charts. Overall, my data proved my lesson to be successful, but one of my focus students only met one of the three standards in the post-assessment. Much of my presentation discussed my focus on how to further increase his learning in future lessons and to reflect on the areas of my instruction that he struggled in the most.
