Blog Post #1

About Me

Hello, my name is Michael Breckenridge and I am glad to know that you have taken time out of your busy day and have decided to read my blog. To start with a little background information, I was born in Mobile, Alabama on July 16th, 1991. I lived with my parents and brother, who is older, in the same house all the way until I turned 18. While I was growing up I never wanted to be inside. Every afternoon I would get home from school and immediately go outside and start playing. My main activity had to have been sports. When I turned 4 I started playing baseball, and all the way through high school I participated in football, basketball, baseball, golf, and swam competitively. After I graduated Murphy High school three of my buddies and myself decided that we were tired of living in Mobile, and we decided that we would go to college at the University of Southern Mississippi. After a semester of not going to class and goofing off with my friends all day, my scholarship was revoked, so it was back to Mobile for me.

Once I returned to Mobile I moved back in with my parents, and got accepted into the University of South Alabama. Honestly I feel like I was blessed by not being able to return to Southern Miss, because it made me grow up and realize that in order to succeed I have to manage my time and apply myself. Now having this new since of maturity I was able to make good grades and not have to worry about failing out of college. I ended up joining a fraternity, Kappa Sigma, which has turned out to be a great decision, because now I have great friends and have learned valuable business skills. After changing my major 4 times I landed on being a secondary education English major, because I have always made A's and B's in English and I want to be able to coach a sport. My main goal in life is to find a wife and have 2 or 3 kids and enjoy their company.

My Teaching Techniques

Well my main goal as a professional is to become an English teacher for any grade in high school. If I had to choose a preferable grade, I would choose the eleventh grade and try and coach baseball. My main focus, as a teacher will be to try and make my students enjoy writing, instead of dreading it. The reason behind doing this is language is the key to learning and if students actually enjoy writing and reading then in theory they will become more intelligent. Also if students enjoy writing it will help solve the ever-growing problem of procrastination, because if students enjoy writing they will not wait until the last minute to start their paper.

One process I want to implement as a teacher is making my students grade one another's papers. When I was in English 101 at Southern Miss our professor gave us a random students paper to grade. At the time I thought the process was stupid but now I feel like it helped me learn what to look for when I revise my papers. Which is a good asset to have when you are about to turn in a very important essay at the end of a semester.

One of the tools I want to use to allow this to happen is to allow my students write anything they want to about the topic. What I mean by this is most schools have a summer reading list and make students write book reports on assigned reading. With this tool I will allow students to write anything about the book. For example if the book is "The Old Man and The Sea" written by Earnest Hemingway, which is a classic summer reading assignment, I would not make my students write a book report about, which they could if they wanted too, I would just make them write about the book in general. So if a student wanted to write about how bad of a book it was, or why they decided not to read "The Old Man and The Sea" because they do not think summer, which is their off time, should be filled with homework. I feel like this tool will help allow students to write about something they can enjoy writing about and also maybe teach them how to write a good persuasive essay.

I want to be able to conduct my classroom as if it were a board of executives. With myself being the CEO of the class and all of the students being the shareholders. I want the students to realize that this is their education, or their business for this example, if they think that something they are doing is an injustice I want them to raise their hand and tell me why they think that. I also want my classroom to be able to tell me how they feel and what direction they want the class to go in because ultimately I am there to teach them. So I feel like if they want the class to go in one direction I should allow them to let their voice be heard since they are in school for themselves.

Time Management 

After watching Dr. Pausch's video on time management it made me rethink how I have been managing my time. I think the main part of the video that appealed to me, and probably a lot of others as well, was when he compared time with money. This probably stuck out to me the most because I have to work 3 jobs just to be able to afford my rent and bills, and when Dr. Pausch was saying how effectively managing time is making money I was definitely paying attention.

I think the whole video was very well produced, he was very good at gaining the viewers attention and he was able to keep their attention by telling jokes and relating to everyone in the audience. One thing I will try to take from this video is attempting to complete my most difficult task's first. This way when I feel overloaded with work it will be a downhill battle instead of an uphill one. I had never heard of Dr. Pausch before this video but if he were a professor at my university I would definitely take him and encourage others to do the same.