It’s been real. It’s been fun. It’s been real fun.

When I looked at the syllabus for this class, I remember thinking, “This woman is crazy. Does she want me to read a whole library this semester?” Even if we would have read a whole library, I still would’ve been grateful. I learned so much this semester. I feel like it helped me grow up. It made me realize that I have to read a lot and do a lot in order to prepare myself to face my students. If I don’t have much experience with children’s books, how am I supposed to help my students when they come to me for guidance? This class was an eye-opener. I certainly wasn’t very excited for parts of this class, like poetry or graphic novels, but they helped me better myself as a future educator. Now I have resources to be able to pull from and refer to when I come across these topics. The biggest thing that I learned in this class is that I love reading. For the longest time I thought reading was a chore, and I didn’t feel like wasting my spare time with my nose in a book. This class helped me remember the 12-year-old girl I used to be who finished a Harry Potter book in two days. I’ve learned to put aside my own thoughts of how I may feel about a genre or book because a student I have may feel differently. I don’t want to discourage someone from enjoying something or choosing a certain book because they know that I don’t like it. It’s not about me. I’ve learned that I’m going to be poor. Books are not cheap! But that’s okay; who needs food anyway? It’s very hard for me to come up with something that I wish I had learned. If this class would’ve been less awesome and a little more miserable, I could probably think of something. But that’s not the case. This was one of my favorite classes. Not only because it was fun and laid back, but it was just completely different from any class I’ve ever had. It felt like a community. We could hold intelligent conversations and share useful ideas, and it’s sad to say that I haven’t really had that in my other courses. Everyone was working toward the same goal and we were helping each other along the way. We’re all in this together. (<– I know every single word to that song) All jokes and singing aside, this really was one of my favorite classes and I recommend it to everyone. The final resource website is something that I didn’t really take seriously at the beginning of the semester. It didn’t seem like something that I would use in the future and I was only going to do it to get the points. As I worked on it over the semester, I found so many different things on the Internet. So many teachers have blogs and lessons plans and anything else you can think of that are so useful. I was shocked by how much was out there. And what a surprise, they had resources for everything that we’ve been talking about in class. Must be a weird coincidence… It started to get me excited. A lot of classes give us the information that we need to know in order to teach to students, but they don’t exactly tell you how to do that. It was nice to see that there are resources out there that help with the “how to” part of teaching.

As we approach the last few days of the semester, I find myself feeling nostalgic. It takes me back to high school graduation. It feels like I’m leaving all of my friends again. That may be a bit of a drastic example, but I will genuinely miss this class and everyone in it. I’m sure I’ll see some in other classes. But it’s just not the same. It wont be in our 341 family. I also realized after our last meeting that I wouldn’t be coming back. It was our LAST meeting. And I didn’t get to do the whole corny good-bye that the teacher and students do on the day of the final. So to everyone in the class, it’s been great. I loved this class and everyone made it an awesome place to come to every Monday and Wednesday afternoon. And most importantly, thank you Kim. I know you couldn’t care less about what your students think of you, but I’m willing to bet that 99% of them feel as lucky as me to have had you as a teacher. Thank you for everything. You’re kind of a big deal.

-Sam