Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Introductory Letter Post

Hello, my name is Shelby Ramirez. I am a post-baccalaureate student at EWU currently enrolled in ENGL 493 Teaching Literature to Adolescents. I am a teacher candidate and hoping to be part of the MIT cohort at EWU in the summer. Currently, I have no official student teaching experience in the classroom, but I have coached basketball at the high school and collegiate levels for several years. It was from my experience coaching that lead me into the world of teaching.

I received my undergraduate degree from the University of Puget Sound in Business Administration. It turns out those classes are not very helpful when you decide you want to become an English teacher. I began my English endorsement work last semester at a different university, and now am a full-time student at Eastern. I plan to finish my endorsement classes over the next two quarters before entering the MIT program this summer. I also have a M.Ed from the University of Washington, which was a great experience and continued to help me learn my true passion for teaching.

One of my strengths as a potential teacher of English Language Arts is my ability to make connections with students. Through coaching, I was able to recognize that I had an ability to gain students’ trust and they often sought me out for advice. Another strength I have is that I care about the kids. I understand this doesn’t sound like a ”strength” in the traditional use of the word, but I have found that far too often people who become teachers really don’t care about the kids, or even like them. I do. The ability to care about the kids and the fact I really do like kids, are huge strengths that not all teacher candidates posses.


A weakness I would really like to overcome in this class is being confident in my knowledge, and portraying that in a public setting. When I am knowledgeable about a topic, I feel comfortable discussing it with many people, but sometimes it takes me extra long to build that confidence required for public speaking.  That is my main goal for this class, is to improve my delivery and how I present to a larger group of people.

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