Get To Know the Future Mrs. Reed

Hey my fellow blogger!
My name is Brittany Reed. I will be a senior at Mississippi State University in the fall of 2012. I was born in Meridian, MS on September 25. My dad was in the Navy at the time, so we moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia when I was born. We moved five more times after that to different states in the United States. We finally settled back down in Mississippi near Meridian in1998.
Some fun little facts about me include: I am a huge soccer fan! I love chocolate. Penguins are my favorite animal. I love to travel but I hate flying. I have been out of the country once. I traveled to London and South Africa in the same trip. This trip was actually during the World Cup 2010. Needless to say, to be in South Africa while the World Cup was going on, was the best thing I have experienced in my life!!

The first thing that motivated me to become a teacher was the best person I know, my mom. I loved acting like a teacher in her classroom after school when I was little. I made all my friends, who their moms were teachers as well, pretend to be my students. When I pretended to be the teacher, I always acted like how my mom was as a teacher. My mom is a great teacher and role model. I hope one day I am at least half the woman and amazing teacher she is. The second thing that motivated me to become a teacher was being active in my youth group and working with the children's ministries. By working with the children's ministries for six years in the youth group and continuing to do it to this day, has definitely gave me the motivation to become a teacher. I love spending time with children and seeing that look on their face when they learn something new, it is priceless!
My goals for this course include making good grades, learning as much as possible about middle school, and observing teachers in middle school grades to show me how to and not to act in the classroom.

I hope to learn how to teach middle school from this class. My mom has taught elementary my whole life and I have observed many elementary classrooms, so I have seen many different strategies for teaching in the elementary.  I have never observed teachers in middle school. I do not know how to motivate this age group or how to teach in a way that is interesting to them. I want to learn as much as possible to do these things and be a successful teacher for middle school grades.

From my middle school experiences, when I was in middle school, some teachers did beneficial things and others did not. Three beneficial things these teachers did were took us on a field trip to Vicksburg to show us the battle fields from the Civil War lesson we studied, helped us any way they could with our studies, and helped us with personal struggles. Many of the female teachers I had were very good teachers in middle school. My social studies teacher took us to Vicksburg because we studied the Civil War for most of the year. The other teachers made sure that we understood what was being taught. I went through a lot of personal struggles in middle school. I was involved in many "cat fights" and did not know how to handle it because I am the type of girl who is a peacemaker. Many of these nice teachers, helped me get through these struggles and gave me advice.
Some teachers did beneficial things and other teachers did things that were detrimental. Three detrimental things they did were making the students teach a part of the lesson, not teaching to our interests, and taking up class time for sports time. Many of my teachers were coaches. These coaches style of teaching was to make us read and answer questions in the back of the book. Then to switch up a little bit, they would assign the different topics to the students and makes us teach. These coaches never taught and that is why I do not remember what I was taught for most of my middle school years. They also took up class time to take us to the field, so they could do the work on the field they wanted to do. 

I believe I have many good qualities to offer to the classroom community. I am a hard worker, like having good discussions, I give many ideas, and I am a peacemaker. All these qualities help me be a great participant in a group project or in the classroom.