As a wannabe English teacher, I felt like this post title was apt: after all, these are the questions that we expect students to answer in papers, so shouldn't we? I won't answer them one by one, but I can promise that as a reporter by nature, I crammed them all in to this post.
For starters, Who the heck am I?
To start simple, my name is Molly Hurford. I graduated in 2008 from Rutgers University with a degree in Journalism and English and a minor in Women's Studies. After graduating, it hit me (like a ton of bricks) that, like every other female for the past 5 generations of my family, I wanted to be a teacher. So, it was back to Rutgers to go to the Graduate School of Education to get my Masters in English Education, which brings us to the present.
In the interim, I also became a semi-elite triathlete, a Cat 3 cyclist on the Rutgers Cycling Team, and a freelance journalist, publishing articles in Triathlete Magazine. Write what you know! Prior to my personality shift towards the sporty, I was a little punk kid writing zines, which oddly led to a job working for ELLEgirl magazine, a teen fashion magazine focused on the "alternative" girl. Luckily, the zine writing got me the job, and landed me a great feature about zines and how to write them. I also wrote about things like knitting and feminism, did book reviews, and even wrote about and was photographed getting a tattoo. This high school newspaper Editor in Chief was going places!
So what changed and made me switch to education? For one thing, I realized after a year of working in NYC that I don't like the city lifestyle, and journalism- the kind I wanted to do- meant I would almost assuredly end up in a city. Then, I started tutoring at the Rutgers Plangere Writing Center, which led to tutoring student athletes at the Hale Center, and eventually tutoring EOF and ESL students for Student Support Services. It struck me that not only was I good at tutoring, but I was enjoying it. Much as I hated to admit it, I was clearly cut out to be a teacher.
Onto what everyone really cares about: what is this blog going to be about?
Now, I'm in my first full-time year of grad school, and find myself reading everything I can about using new media in the classroom and trying to work it into the lessons I'm teaching in the class that I'm observing- a seventh grade Language Arts class. I decided start this blog in order to put down my thoughts about some of the books I was reading, about the lesson plans I'm developing, and about what it feels like to be a student and a teacher at the same time. It seems to me that if I'm reading about new media with intentions of using it in the classroom, it's imperative that I practice what I preach, so I intend to use this blog as an experiment in new media uses. Also, I plan to allow readers to see the trajectory of my "career" as I try to decide what to do with my life after this semester: will I stay in grad school? Will I look for work in a private school? Will I sign up for Teach for America? It should be a fun ride!
Expect to see video and audio posts, links to things like my GoodReads account, experiments with classroom uses for Twitter and Facebook, and real life examples of suggestions from the great books that I'm reading. With any luck, I can even bring in some new media ways of connecting with some of the brilliant minds who are authoring the work that I highlight! Skype, anyone?
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