Danna Lyon
RE 5040
What I Believe About Literacy Learning and Teaching and How I Came To Believe It
I can hardly remember a time when I was not able to read. My mother began reading to me when I was a few months old and continued this until I was reading on my own. She read to me every night before I went to sleep. My great-grandmother read to me everyday as she kept me while my parents were at work. At the age of two, my grandmother began keeping me and she read to me also. Everyday my mother would pack books in a bag to take to her house. I really enjoyed the Disney books that came every month as a part of a book club. Two of my favorites were Bambi and The Jungle Book. My brother is three years older, so when he started to school and carried books, I had to have books also. He learned to read in kindergarten because he was in a K-2 combination class. I had the belief if he could do it, then so could I. My mom would also check out books from her school and bring them home for me to look at and have them read to me.
Finally in August 1982 I started to school. My kindergarten teacher prepared me to begin reading. I actually began to read at the first of the year in the first grade. This began with the use of vocabulary words and the teacher and teacher assistant working with each student individually. Together we would pick out a book and I would learn all the words building up to the time when I would read all the words back to her. They would also let us make up stories and they would write them down and then have us read them back. Pizza Hut sponsored a reading program called “Book It.” After a certain number of books were read, a certificate was awarded to me to take to Pizza Hut and redeem for a Personal Pan Pizza. I loved pizza, so this was an added incentive for me to read continually. This program continued throughout my primary grade years. The Serendipity Series were some of my favorite books at this age. I remember loving one about a unicorn.
I was always a good student in school as my parents stressed the importance of hard work and performing to the best of my ability. This paid off, as I was first in my class at the end of my eighth grade year. My high school years required hard work as my parents stressed a college education. Being an editor of the yearbook my junior and senior year proved to be very challenging, time consuming, and very rewarding. Organization, editing, cropping, and writing “clips” for pictures were very beneficial skills that I learned in this class. This class pushed me the hardest of any class up to this point.
It was time for college and I needed to decide on a major. When I was growing up I wanted to be a pharmacist. This changed when I had chemistry my junior year in high school. So I headed into college majoring in Speech Pathology. My junior year at Appalachian I took two of the beginning classes for speech therapy and decided this wasn’t the right major for me either.
It was inevitable from the beginning, I think, that I decided to become a teacher.
Teaching was all I had ever known. My mom, dad, brother, sister-n-law, and best friend are all teachers. My mother taught fourth grade for sixteen years, eighth grade for four years, she was an assistant principal for ten years, and now she is in her second year as principal. My dad has always taught seventh and eighth grade life science. Noah and Cindy, my brother and his wife, are physical education teachers. My best friend is a third grade teacher. During breaks in college, I would substitute at the high school in my hometown to earn some extra money. At this point, teaching became a career that I thought more and more about. I really enjoyed this experience and it gave me insight into many different curriculum areas. I substituted for the Family and Consumer Sciences teacher one day during a lab experience. Observing the way the students were learning by “doing” really got me interested in this area. The many different facets of Family and Consumer Sciences was also very interesting to me. As you can tell, teaching was all around me.
One of my favorite Christmas presents when I was little was a little red table and chairs and a chalkboard. I can remember playing school in the basement for hours. I think my mom always knew I would become a teacher.
It’s ironic that I didn’t realize my mother’s first degree was in Home Economics Education until I had declared my major in Family and Consumer Sciences Education. Needless to say, she was very proud I was following in her footsteps. Then I knew if I could become half the teacher she was I would be a very successful teacher. My mom was my teacher in the fourth and eighth grade. Naturally, some of my classmates thought I would be the teacher’s pet. Boy, were they ever wrong. These were the two hardest years of my elementary experience. She was the most wonderful and demanding teacher I have ever had. My mom was definitely harder on me than anyone else in the class. She knew my ability and challenged me to work extremely hard to meet that ability. Looking back I really feel she inspired me to become a teacher. She has always been my number one role model. I have never seen or met anyone who loved their job anymore than she does and I have definitely never known anyone who works as hard as she does.
As bad as this may sound, I also became a teacher because of the summer vacation, holidays, and weekends off. Now, allow me to explain this statement. I remember when I was growing up how great it was for my brother and me to have our parents home with us in the summer and on holidays. My mom would take Noah and me to the pool daily from opening to closing. I know most of my friends didn’t have this luxury. She would also take us to the public library for programs and to check out books. On really hot days, mom and dad would take us riding on the parkway and we would pull off and enjoy a picnic lunch. We spent a great deal of quality family time during these vacations from school. Those were the days and if I have children I want to be able to spend this time with them like my parents could with us.
In conclusion, as I stated before I think it was inevitable from the beginning that I would become a teacher. I can’t imagine a more rewarding or enjoyable career. Talking to students after they have graduated high school and seeing them succeed in life is all I need to remind me why I became a teacher.