My name is Kayla Parazine, however it has only been that way for about two months now. I was Kayla Byrd and I grew up in a small town called Frisco City, Alabama. I graduated high school from a small private school there and also graduated with my associate’s degree from Alabama Southern Community College in Monroeville, which is right outside of my hometown. From there I moved to Troy, Alabama where I attended Troy University to pursue a degree in Secondary Collaborative Education. While at Troy I got engaged to my husband Ryan Parazine, who attends University of Mobile on a baseball scholarship, and moved back home after the fall semester to take online classes and plan a wedding! We got married this June and now here I am in Mobile and attending USA.
I honestly was never interested in education until a couple of years ago when I went on a mission trip to Ghana, Africa. At the time I was enrolled in nursing school with no intentions on changing my major, much less changing it to education. While in Africa we went into different schools and taught in the classrooms there the truth of Jesus Christ. For the first time I stood up in front of students in a classroom setting and taught something I am very passionate about. Needless to say, I had a life changing experience over there in Africa. It changed my whole view of teaching and that it is not about spitting out facts and hoping the students will understand. It taught me that you have to be passionate about what you are teaching and wanting your students to understand just as you do so they can apply it to their lives. As you can tell, nursing school did not workout and I did exactly what I said I never would do, become an educator.
Randy Pausch on Time Management
From Dr. Pausch’s video I learned that it is important to focus more on doing the right things rather than doing things right because that is better than doing the wrong things really well. Also, that experience comes with time. I like what he said when he pointed out that, that is why we pay so much in American society because we are paying for their experience because that is something you can not fake. Next thing is that failing to plan is planning to fail. When we plan, it has to be done at multiple levels, for example, by day, by week, and by semester. And our plans will most likely change, so that is why we have to plan in the first place! And lastly, having a to do list. It is important to break things down into small steps and ‘to do the ugliest thing first’ ( I love the frog analogy he gave ).
I have learned that Dr. Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and he learned in 2006 that he had pancreatic cancer. He gave his infamous “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” in September of 2007 and the media got a hold to it, which he says was unintentional and was made just for his students. As a result of the media outbreak, he co-authored a book called The Last Lecture, which became a New York Times best seller. Dr. Pausch passed away from complications due to his cancer on July 25 of 2008.
Helpful Time Management Exercises
Some helpful tips I took from this article was: being reasonable and setting realistic goals, making sure to stop and rest every hour, start paying attention to the time wasters such as television or how much time we spend on the phone, use waiting time to do small tasks, have a regular study area, not on the couch or bed where you are more likely to become comfortable, and to set priorities for yourself each morning or the night before. Being realistic in your expectations for yourself is most important.
You did great on this first post, especially since it was the first one you've done in this class. You made sure to identify the videos that you were talking about and also even looked up additional information on Dr. Pausch (something I wish I would have done). The only real critique I would like to add is that your writing as a whole could improve. Their is a ton of potential in it and great personality, but does lack some sentence structure. Starting your sentences with "and" and those types of things, even those are petty things, is just one thing I would point out. You did a great job with this assignment overall. A+ from me!
ReplyDeleteP.S. Awesome layout!