College life

I went to college during the fall of 2000, and knew that I was going to be a teacher of some kind. Before I went to college, I thought I would be a choir teacher, so I ordered the materials from the School of Fine Arts about music education. However, when I got the information, I had a sick feeling inside. I told my dad about the feeling, and he said that maybe I should just declare an open major, and figure out as I was attending college what I would like to be. That felt like a really good idea to me. When I was in high school, I took AP U.S. History, so I enrolled in some general classes to get those generals out of the way. I loved all my history classes, and decided that I needed to be a History Teaching major. I had some friends during my freshman year who were taking a U.S. History class that I didn’t need to take. They were required to attend some films, and I went with them because I liked history so much. I also decided that my minor would be English Teaching. It didn’t take me long to decide, and I was glad that I loved what I was studying. I took the introduction class to teaching, and was required to attend some preschool, elementary, junior high, high school, and special needs classes. After attending all of those classes with teachers, I decided that I did not want to do the usual “student teaching” method that was normally required for graduation. Instead, I decided that it would be better to get an internship, so that I could be in charge of my own classroom right from the beginning. I was also excited that I could get paid half salary to do it. At the time, that seemed like a lot of money to me. I interviewed for a few internship positions, and was able to get an internship at Lehi Junior High in Lehi, Utah. I was teaching mostly U.S. History, and a couple of classes of Utah History. I was very excited about this, and excited that I could start the internship in August of 2003. When I had taken the introduction to teaching class, it was only a block class that was offered during the beginning of the semester at BYU. I had 17 credits during that semester, and thought that I would take two more two-credit classes during the 2^nd block, because they were offered. Looking back on it, that was not the smartest idea, but it helped me be able to do my internship in the fall, instead of having lingering classes that needed to be finished.