Course Reflections

                   What is essential in child & youth development? This is the guiding question of our class, Eco-Human Experience. This question was the focal point and guide for each of our assignments and class discussions throughout the semester.           Much of our class discussions focused on how children and adolescence develop. One assignment that we did was a great showcase of this focus. The Bioecological Self Analysis intended for us to pick a significant time period in our lives and chronicle how each system affected your development. Individual, Macrosystem, Mesosystem, Exosystem, Macrosysyem, and Chronosystem. Each level represented a different part of who you were and how you developed. For me, my project helped me understand how the experiences, social interactions and outside influences shape us as individuals. As an example, I c...

How do people learn ? This is the guiding question for Perspectives of Learning. This question shaped everything we learned in class this semester. All our readings, and writing assignments were geared towards this question. As future teachers, it is a question we will be faced with regularly and we need to understand and accept the differences of How People Learn. Born on a Blue Day, a memoir by Daniel Tammet was a great book for Perspectives of Learning as it examined an autistic savant with mathematical skills not to be believed, think Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory. Daniel was a human calculator and that made him different from his peers. The book went on to describe how he was shunned by his classmates because of his differences. His ability to remember facts and inexplicable ability to work with numbers. It offered readers an insight on how he experienced the world. I loved this book. Daniels thinking was so different than my own. It made it hard for me to relate...