Reflection Essay

I have definitely enjoyed the in-classroom service learning. I have learned so much from it. It is such an exciting experience for me to see the classroom life up close. I have wanted to be a teacher all of my life. Since I first learned how to write I would always play around and pretend to be a teacher. Since my mom was a teacher and majored in Education at Florida State, I have taken after her plans and dreams and have formed such an interest in the occupation of teaching. For a few of my birthdays my mom would buy me classroom and teaching supplies to play with. Therefore, it is so exciting for me to finally look at and experience a real classroom. It has assured me that this is the job I want to do after I graduate college.

After a few weeks into starting the volunteering in the classrooms, I started to think about teaching middle school instead of elementary school, which was my original planned major. I realized that the middle school students were a lot more mature than the elementary school students I was dealing with. I then started to think that teaching middle school would be less stressful because I would not have to deal with young kids. I worried that after a while I would wear myself down from trying to calm the young kids down all day, everyday. When I was observing the middle school social studies class, I was able to participate with the teacher. She asked me to grade her papers while she taught the class new information. I was a little excited at first to grade papers because I used to love doing that for my aunt, who is a teacher, also. After a while, it got very tiring doing the same worksheets for a couple different classes.

I looked into changing my major more by talking to my academic advisor and talking to more experienced people within my major and realized it was better for me not to switch. Even though the kids are young, they will still be fun to teach. I also wouldn’t have to specialize