Blog #2 Connecting School and Home Experiences
My home life truly fostered my development for my desire to teach Psychology. Growing up, I remember my parents and father in particular reading all kinds of psychology-based books. Occasionally, when he knew I could understand the concepts, we would have discussions about them. These conversations and my own desire to understand human behavior led me to begin creating my own theories about why people do certain things. I would discuss those theories with my father occasionally. As I grew older, I began to confide a lot of things about my life to my father. He was like my own personal therapist growing up. I knew that he knew a lot of information about human behavior, having read a lot of books about it. I felt comfortable and I found that he helped me gain more insights into my own life and why I did certain things. He helped me see different parts of my life that I may have not payed much attention to. Having "ah ha" moments about my own behavior created a distinct desire to know more and more. As odd as it is to say, I started to love becoming more self-aware of my behavior.
While I was serving a LDS mission, I came in contact with a "Stop Smoking" program designed to help those who wanted to quit smoking. In explaining the program it talked a lot about Pavlov's dogs and how that response related to triggers in smokers. That idea fascinated me as well and gave more context as to why people continue to smoke despite knowledge that it is harmful. As I started to get answers from random parts of my life, I decided to focus on that when I went to school to get more and more context into human behavior.
Besides self-awareness I really didn't come into contact with a lot of psychological principles and concepts until I began my post high school education. Even in high school I didn't have a lot of recognized contact with it. Psychology is all around us, but it has to be made aware of. Until it is, we won't, and I didn't experience its full effects.
Although the experiences I talked about were rather vague in nature, they have, over time, influenced my desire to teach psychology. This tells me that learning about one's behavior is a very very long process, even for me. Understanding this will help me remember that my students won't be able to have all the great "ah-ha" moments that I had throughout my whole life in one semester of teaching. I must equip them with the tools to becoming literate in their own self-awareness in a way that will span their entire life. I hope that they will have a few great experiences in my class and then they can take those experiences with them and build on them. I also know that my love for psychology has taken some time to develop and that some students won't like it no matter how long it would take. Understanding this will serve to calm me down when talking about psychology to the point that they will listen to me and possibly gain some insights into their lives no matter where their interest level lies.
While I was serving a LDS mission, I came in contact with a "Stop Smoking" program designed to help those who wanted to quit smoking. In explaining the program it talked a lot about Pavlov's dogs and how that response related to triggers in smokers. That idea fascinated me as well and gave more context as to why people continue to smoke despite knowledge that it is harmful. As I started to get answers from random parts of my life, I decided to focus on that when I went to school to get more and more context into human behavior.
Besides self-awareness I really didn't come into contact with a lot of psychological principles and concepts until I began my post high school education. Even in high school I didn't have a lot of recognized contact with it. Psychology is all around us, but it has to be made aware of. Until it is, we won't, and I didn't experience its full effects.
Although the experiences I talked about were rather vague in nature, they have, over time, influenced my desire to teach psychology. This tells me that learning about one's behavior is a very very long process, even for me. Understanding this will help me remember that my students won't be able to have all the great "ah-ha" moments that I had throughout my whole life in one semester of teaching. I must equip them with the tools to becoming literate in their own self-awareness in a way that will span their entire life. I hope that they will have a few great experiences in my class and then they can take those experiences with them and build on them. I also know that my love for psychology has taken some time to develop and that some students won't like it no matter how long it would take. Understanding this will serve to calm me down when talking about psychology to the point that they will listen to me and possibly gain some insights into their lives no matter where their interest level lies.
I enjoted how you tied your own interests in psychology to literacy at the end of this post. I also agree with you on the importance realizing that not all students will enjoy our subjects that we teach, in fact, we'll be lucky if even most do. So we need to find skills as teachers to make our subjects more interesting to our students through literacy skills and making our students feel more empowered through the texts and literacy options we provide.
ReplyDeleteEven though at the end you said that your experiences were rather vague in regards to teaching, I can definitely see how they did. I grew up reading books and having my mom read a lot of books to me. My content is English, and I chose it because I love to read. I never liked writing research papers and things like that, but one of the things that we learn about in our classes is that writing isn't big papers. I loved to write lists, journal entries, and short stories growing up. What we do growing up and our home environment definitely influences who we are.
ReplyDeletePerhaps you can pass on many of these lessons to your own students, and, as you said, at least by helping them be literate start them on a journey that will help them think for longer than just your class. I think that's a key part of teaching, realizing that we're a point on their trajectory, that we won't teach them everything in just one class, but will influence their learning for the future.
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