This week's Aha Moment is shared by Aviva Dunsiger, also known on Twitter as @grade1, and she is a a Grade 1 teacher in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada. She is an active member of my PLN who helps many teachers both new and old. She taught Kindergarten for eight years before making the move to Grade 1. Aviva loves using various Web 2.0 tools in her classroom to make learning more meaningful for students. As she says: Through my Grade 1 Website, Grade 1 Blog, Professional Blog, and Student Blogs, I share my own learning with others, and my students share their learning too. Many thanks to Pernille Ripp (@4thGrdTeach) for asking me to do the Guest Blog Post this week. I’m excited to share my Aha Moment with all of you!
For as long as I can remember, I wanted to teach. When I was in Kindergarten and Grade 1, I used to pretend to play school, and I even wrote my lessons on the wall. There’s a house somewhere in Thornhill, Ontario that still has my Process Writing Lesson on the wall underneath numerous coats of paint.:)
School never came easily for me though, and while I always worked hard, I never seemed to make the grade. In Grade 2, I had a Psych Assessment done, and I found out that I had a non-verbal learning disability. I will never forgot the feedback from that Psych Assessment: I was told that due to the severity of my learning disability, I would always struggle with school, and I would be lucky if I even made it to college. In other words, forget about university, and forget about my dreams of becoming a teacher. I was devastated!
Looking back now, I guess that I could have given up at that point. I never did though. Despite having a really significant learning disability, I also had some really significant strengths. I learned how to capitalize on those strengths. My mom and step-dad helped teach me strategies to be successful in the classroom and to advocate for myself so that I got the accommodations that I needed to be successful too. I always spent double the amount of time on the homework as my peers, and in certain subjects, like geography, the lessons would often lead to tears and frustration, but I never gave up. I wanted to teach!
Thanks to self-advocacy, amazing support from home, and strategies that really worked, I ended up graduating from high-school on the honour roll, and I even got a scholarship to university. It was when I got the phone call from the President of Nipissing University offering me a Presidential Scholarship and a place in the Bachelor of Arts and Introduction to Teaching Program, that I had my Aha Moment: anyone can learn! As teachers, we just need to find a way to ensure that all students do learn. I cannot thank my wonderful teachers enough: they didn’t give up on me, and as a result, I never gave up on myself.
This is my tenth year teaching, and every year, I get a new group of students and a new opportunity to make a difference. My own experience has taught me that we can never give up on our students, and that we need to find a way to ensure that all of them succeed. At the bottom of all of my e-mails, I have this signature: “If they don’t learn the way you teach, teach the way they learn.” I am thankful for the teachers that did just this for me, and I will always do this for my students too!
School never came easily for me though, and while I always worked hard, I never seemed to make the grade. In Grade 2, I had a Psych Assessment done, and I found out that I had a non-verbal learning disability. I will never forgot the feedback from that Psych Assessment: I was told that due to the severity of my learning disability, I would always struggle with school, and I would be lucky if I even made it to college. In other words, forget about university, and forget about my dreams of becoming a teacher. I was devastated!
Looking back now, I guess that I could have given up at that point. I never did though. Despite having a really significant learning disability, I also had some really significant strengths. I learned how to capitalize on those strengths. My mom and step-dad helped teach me strategies to be successful in the classroom and to advocate for myself so that I got the accommodations that I needed to be successful too. I always spent double the amount of time on the homework as my peers, and in certain subjects, like geography, the lessons would often lead to tears and frustration, but I never gave up. I wanted to teach!
Thanks to self-advocacy, amazing support from home, and strategies that really worked, I ended up graduating from high-school on the honour roll, and I even got a scholarship to university. It was when I got the phone call from the President of Nipissing University offering me a Presidential Scholarship and a place in the Bachelor of Arts and Introduction to Teaching Program, that I had my Aha Moment: anyone can learn! As teachers, we just need to find a way to ensure that all students do learn. I cannot thank my wonderful teachers enough: they didn’t give up on me, and as a result, I never gave up on myself.
This is my tenth year teaching, and every year, I get a new group of students and a new opportunity to make a difference. My own experience has taught me that we can never give up on our students, and that we need to find a way to ensure that all of them succeed. At the bottom of all of my e-mails, I have this signature: “If they don’t learn the way you teach, teach the way they learn.” I am thankful for the teachers that did just this for me, and I will always do this for my students too!
