Retired teacher/administrator

I was really pleased with the information I learned from Mr. Chambliss in class. He had a lot of really interesting and important information to share with us seeing as he was both an educator and an administrator, and I feel like his advice will definitely be a service to me in my future career choices. I also found it very comforting that he had such high regard for liberal arts educated teachers becasue as a student of a liberal arts college, I know the valuse of this type of education, but I wasn't sure if other people could see the positives. Another thing that I found to be very helpful was his advice on when we should take our GRE exam. My sister just took the GRE this semester which made me start wondering about when I needed to take the test myself. His advice for us to become leaders in our new environments/workplaces will be extremely benficial to . I did have a slight issue with his notion that you shouldn't do the same thing for an extended period of time because as a music educator, its not as if you can just change the subject you teach whenever you want. I do think that it is important to change the ways you go about intsructing your students however, because there is never one way of teaching that will appeal to every student in your class at the same time. Reinventing yourself and your practices will ultimately keep both you and your students interested in what you are working towards.

Teacher Panel

I thought I would write a blog in order to reflect on the experience because there were a lot of interesting things said. To begin with, I thought it was kind of unfortunate that all three of the teachers on the panel taught at the Elementary level, and were all from Decorah originally. Obviously this doesn't mean that they didn't have valid and important things to talk about, but I would have liked a little more of a diverse group in order to see if their experiences and philosophical views would match up. For the most part I felt like the 3 teachers were in accordance on a lot of topics. I thought it was really cool to hear about their lives now as opposed to when they were still college students. I also felt inspired to maybe look into teaching abroad, seeing as I enjoy traveling and different cultures as much as I do. I also thought their collective advise on paying extreme attention to classroom management practices was helpful. I wish there would have been a new music teacher to talk to just because I feel like that would have peaked my interest personally because that's the role I'll be in myself in just few short years.