Weekly Reading Reflection on Chapter 11 for the week of April 9

My goal: To read the news every day

My Objectives:
1. To become more educated on current events

My methods: I get CNN's top news stories on my homepage, and they're updated daily, so it was really a matter of not being lazy and clicking on the links and reading the news stories. The biggest reason I hadn't been doing it up until now is that I felt I didn't have time, but it turns out that clicking the links and reading all the top stories didn't take more than 10 or 15 minutes each day, and, even after a few days, I feel I am much more informed than I was at this time last week.

Assessment: Obviously, I learned more about current events this week, but I think this activity goes deeper than that. I learned that many times, the reasons we find for not doing things that are good for us, from reading the news to exercising to sleeping enough, are not often very good ones. "I don't have time" is really common, but I think that many times, that's just an excuse for us to not push ourselves to do something even though we know we should. Now that I know how little time and effort it takes to inform myself, I'm definitely going to continue.

Reflection: Learning more about current events has definitely been good for the future teacher in me. First (and I know this has nothing to do with the reading, but I thought it was great anyway), CNN.com has a section specifically on education, which is one of the most important things I should be up-to-date on. However, relating the news to creating learning environments was a little tougher than relating it to benefits for educators in general. However, there was one part of the reading that I feel this is quite relevant to. Woolfolk referred to it as "withitness." She talks about it specific to time in the classroom and portraying an air of "eyes in the back of your head" to the students, but I think a teacher's withitness extends beyond that. The more a teacher knows about current events, even beyond current events in education, the better he or she can make connections that may be helpful in classroom management.