Hello,
My name is Philip John Peterson and I am currently enrolled in EDSC F658 under the capacity of seeking my Masters of Secondary Education. I recently graduated from my undergraduate degree of English and minor of French. I have always had a love of story telling, be it in the form of literature, film, graphic novel, or other media.
My desire to teach began early in life when I discovered the joy of passing knowledge and information to another person. When I teach I feel as though I am empowering those around me. My desire to teach is not wholly driven by positive experiences though. I have had quite a few bad experiences as a student in the past. I’ve had teachers give up on me, one who labeled me as a special education student and told me that I didn’t belong in his classroom, and teachers who simply didn’t attempt to differentiate to my learning style. These experiences have driven me to do all that I can to learn the complexities of learning styles and to differentiate as much as I possibly can.
But enough about my motivations on behalf of my educator side.
While I was born in Houston Texas, my family moved to Alaska when I was three months old and I’ve lived here ever since. I’ve spent that past six years living in Fairbanks, and I am now working out of Minto during my internship.
Hobby wise, I read quite a lot. And I write, though not as much as I’d like to. Over the past year I did manage to find time to complete Robert Jordan’s fifteen book series The Wheel of Time. I feel like Jordan has brought my narrative writing to a whole new level. Recently I have been enjoying Stephen King’s Dark Tower series when I find the time. My goal is to eventually become a published author. I am working on outlining a series of Science Fantasy novels. The progression is slow, doubly so now that I am in my graduate program. It isn’t something that I feverishly work on, more something that I come back to when I have the time to work on it. It will eventually reach the shelves of book stores, though not likely in the next few years.
I envision my education program as going by far quicker than I would like it to. It seems like each subsequent semester goes by faster than the previous one. I hope to learn as much as I can, but I know that what I learn from the program will only be a small percentage of what I will learn in the coming years from experience. I hope to take this next year as an opportunity to boost my knowledge of education as far as I can so that I can better support my students when I take over my own classroom next year.
I look forwards to reading other folks postings. I think this will be a great year.
My mentor teacher (right) and I (left) looking rather stoic.
-Philip-