What other significant insight(s) have you gained and how will this insight impact your personal/professional life?

To be frank, I lived in a bit of a world of ignorance. I grew up in a bit of a realm of Caucasian mysticism. Though I knew that people had plights, I had not really had the knowledge until this class of exactly what was happening within the world. From the technology gap to the retention rate of minorities and lower income students to the true necessity of a school to be more than just a paper grading machine.

When the class started, I read about being a responsive teacher, but I assumed that it meant to just react to what is happening in the class, but I now know that when I move on to being a teacher that I need to be responsive to my students lives inside and outside of the classroom along with the impact of the outside world will have on the classroom. An example of this would be in 2001, after 9/11, there was a quick backlash against many people that ranged from Sikh to Muslim, because of the assumed ethnicity of the recipients of the hatred. I realized that what our school did was a responsive reaction in that we quickly had a course about different religions and how no religion can be blamed for something, the people themselves that lead the hatred are. Sadly, it hit too close to home the next day as a friend lost an uncle to a radical person. (1)

Times like these, along with reacting to general needs of students who need help during reading, reacting to peoples reactions to each others based on race and gender and just being a teacher that is much more aware of what is going on in the world other than what is happening is mine, is what I hope to use from this class in both my professional and person life.





(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Balbir_Singh_Sodhi