Disclaimer: This comic is intended to be tongue and cheek, representing the “dream” of becoming a teacher, faced with the reality at the end. I really feel like this program is “renovating” our way of thinking, and when I tried to think of a funny way of portraying that, I came up with the last page.

 

My guiding question is: “How am I going to make sure I succeed?”

Translation: “What is anything and everything that I need to learn to be the best educator I can be for my future students?”

 

Within this seemingly simple question, I feel the background of block 1 behind it. In order to succeed as a teacher, there are many more elements that I know now that I need whereas at the beginning of the program I thought everything would be a breeze. In order to succeed as a teacher, I need to connect with students, as I learned in 391. In order to succeed as a teacher, I need to learn how to incorporate Indigenous knowledge, as I learned in 346 and 446. We’ve covered ethics, the 9 standards, the First Peoples Principles of Learning, and from all of these things elements must be drawn from in order to be successful as a teacher. In 394 we began delving into the BC Curriculum, which is also essential to master for success. For me, my guiding question is a holistic one. Some of my other thoughts rest heavily on the Ted Talks, which is why they’ve become a focal point in the comic. We learned from Shelly Moore about not making assumptions, and we learned from Sir Ken Robinson about what’s been going wrong in education. Daniel Pink left an impression with regards to motivation, and Alfie Kohn made me rethink how I think about grades and learning. Before this course, I probably would have been that person who did summative assessment far more than necessary, and now I’ve learned that that’s no good and doesn’t help the students and creates even more work for the teacher. I’ve fallen down the Ted rabbit hole in search of anything else I feel could be useful to me as a human being and as an educator, and I felt that these Ted Talks augmented the work we were doing in class with assessment, curriculum, and learning progressions. It is in my nature to seek out knowledge, to do better, and to succeed. And this is what I intended to be the underlying framework beneath my comic.

While this last picture is morbid (#darkhumour), I feel it really represents my mental and physical state after the first semester. This program really worked hard to “renovate our thinking” in order to prepare us for the mindset of an educator. Thus, I thought the funniest way to represent a renovation of the mind would be alien probes. Like I said, #darkhumour. 😉