Negative Experience at the Undergraduate Level

 

It saddens me to think that the one of the key experiences I keep coming back to is a negative one, however, I learned a lot that semester about what type of teacher I would want to be as well as the type of motivation it sometimes takes students to perform up to their true ability. I took my Capstone course at the University of Oklahoma from a professor I had taken from before without the best experience. However, it is one that taught me a lot.

 

 

 

 I struggled with taking the course from her, but I reluctantly signed up for her Capstone course as it was the only section that fit within my schedule requirements, as I was finishing my fourth year as a member of the track and field team. My main directive for the semester, though wrong, was just to finish. I was done with school, burnt out from track with its constant travel and hours of daily practice, and working a part-time job during it all had me ready to complete my required courses for my undergraduate and explore what would lie ahead for me after graduation.

 

 

Our final project in the course was a major Capstone paper based off of one of two authors, I didn’t feel stirred in my soul to write, but rather the assignment left me grasping with desperation at motivation and direction. Finding what I felt was no sense of help, direction or motivation I was told my professor to simply “complete the work”,with no real constructive criticism other than to massacre my rough draft into a sea of red marks and condescending tone.

 

Have you ever had a teacher leave you feeling like this too?

Maybe even deserves a facepalm?

 

 

So I simply ‘completed the work’,turned in project and received the worst grade on a paper to date. It left me deflated and with a lack of validation. I had once felt like a decent writer, never great but now, maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I had no business teaching when I couldn’t motivate myself, when I let another adult reduce me to tears over school work. Maybe I wasn’t a good enough writer to be inspiring and teaching a high school generation. These thoughts would haunt me for years and I left school the next semester, undergraduate degree in hand and never once applied for or interviewed for a profession in academics. I began to question a lot, which looking back was very normal for a student exiting with their undergrad at twenty-one years of age.

 

 

At the end of the semester I remember feeling cut off at the knees, exhausted, exasperated and ready to give up on school for a while. I am not certain that it was this one event that made me take my English degree and run after my final semester, without beginning and completing my teaching certificate program, but that is exactly what I did. I found a great sales job making good money, what I believed to be completely unrelated to my English degree, and so I ran. I would in later years realize that it would be experiences such as these that would teach me the most about people, life and most importantly give me the experiences to take into the classroom.

 

 

 

 

Now can you think of a time that that a teacher made you feel this way, or you were unmotivated totally by a project? Can you think of why? What could the teacher have done differently? How could you have been motivated? Think through and write a 5 sentence response as a comment to this blog post.

(10 points)