{"id":2,"date":"2010-06-14T19:53:34","date_gmt":"2010-06-14T19:53:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lauralandstrom.com\/?page_id=2"},"modified":"2010-06-18T00:44:08","modified_gmt":"2010-06-18T00:44:08","slug":"about","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.lauralandstrom.com\/?page_id=2","title":{"rendered":"About Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Habari Gani?<\/p>\n

Welcome to my blog! \u00c2\u00a0My name is Laura Landstrom and I am a 4th grade teacher living in Athens, GA. \u00c2\u00a0I am traveling to Africa this summer under a Fulbright-Hays Scholarship with the US Department of Education and the University of Georgia in Athens.<\/p>\n

A little about me<\/span>:<\/p>\n

I received my undergraduate degree from the University of Texas in Austin in Early Childhood Education with a minor in Childhood Studies in 2003. \u00c2\u00a0 I received \u00c2\u00a0my master’s degree also from the University of Texas in Austin in Curriculum and Instruction in 2009. I taught 5th grade for four years in Austin, TX. \u00c2\u00a0I got married last summer and moved to Athens, Georgia where I began teaching 4th grade at the most wonderful school! \u00c2\u00a0Next year I will be entering my sixth year of teaching.<\/p>\n

My Journey as a teacher:<\/span><\/p>\n

“Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.”<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u201d\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Richard Wright<\/em><\/p>\n

I remember drumming my fingers under my desk and staring at that same area on the ceiling tile, counting over and over again the pattern of dots in it. About the time I started contemplating how the dots formed an impressive profile of George Washington, undoubtedly, my teacher would call on me.\u00c2\u00a0 I, of course, would have no idea what was going on \u00e2\u20ac\u201c something about American history.\u00c2\u00a0 As I got the same lecture on how important it was to pay attention \u00e2\u20ac\u201c that I would NEED to know the exact start and end date of the Civil War to be successful in life \u00e2\u20ac\u201c all I could think to myself was the way to drive home the point of how high the death toll of the Gettysburg Battle was, surely was not by boring YOUR students to death.<\/p>\n

I imagine that is initially what drove me to be a teacher.\u00c2\u00a0 Change.\u00c2\u00a0 I think change has been instrumental in all phases of my career as an educator.\u00c2\u00a0 It is what helped me choose my profession -most of my childhood memories of learning involve sitting in a desk taking notes. My fight for change began selfishly \u00e2\u20ac\u201c so that no other student would suffer the boredom I endured in school.<\/p>\n

The schools I attended growing up were very homogeneous \u00e2\u20ac\u201c all white, middle class, and Christian.\u00c2\u00a0 Crime and poverty were pretty much unheard of in my neighborhood.\u00c2\u00a0 My parents woke me up for school every day, fed me breakfast, read with me, and helped me with my homework every night.\u00c2\u00a0 College was expected of me.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 When I began tutoring students at UT, it opened my eyes to another side of schooling.\u00c2\u00a0 I discovered students who did not get to eat meals regularly, whose parents were uninvolved, and who sometimes had no bed to sleep in at night.\u00c2\u00a0 This was a conscious turning point in my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about education.\u00c2\u00a0 This was no longer an issue of keeping students from being bored in the classroom; this was about keeping students IN the classroom and, more importantly, helping them to feel empowered in their learning.<\/p>\n

Despite the shift in my thinking about education, I still had a lot of changing to do as an educator.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>I walked into school my first day as a new teacher like a soldier walking into battle.\u00c2\u00a0 I was going to change the world.\u00c2\u00a0 All my kids would love me.\u00c2\u00a0 I had spent hours working on creative and fun lesson plans that would keep all students engaged.\u00c2\u00a0 It would be like the movie Stand and Deliver<\/span> (with ten year olds).<\/p>\n

If only.\u00c2\u00a0 I remember sitting in my classroom the last day of the school year thinking, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153what the hell just happened?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 Between having a 5th<\/sup> grade student who did not even know all the letters of the alphabet, having a knife brought to my room, having the principal call APD on one of my students, and a substitute teacher who actually brought a beer to drink at lunch \u00e2\u20ac\u201c my balloon of idealism deflated quite quickly. I was almost unshakeable in my thought that as long as the lesson plans were engaging and fun all kids would learn. My first year of teaching revealed to me there was much more to learning than that.\u00c2\u00a0 I<\/span> would be a great teacher.\u00c2\u00a0 I<\/span> would create lesson plans.\u00c2\u00a0 I<\/span> would change the students\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 lives.\u00c2\u00a0 It took a whole year of mistakes to realize my biggest mistake \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t about what I<\/strong> would do.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact, it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t about me at all – it was about my students.<\/p>\n

The prickling realization of how out of touch I was with my students began subtly.\u00c2\u00a0 Why weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t they getting the cultural references I was making to TV shows, movies, and books?\u00c2\u00a0 How could they have never tried that kind of food?\u00c2\u00a0 The manners they used would have never been acceptable in my household growing up.\u00c2\u00a0 I remember the lack of interest they showed when I read them some of my favorite childhood books, and how their eyes lit up at the reading of Esperanza Rising. <\/span><\/p>\n

The key turning point for me was when my ignorance and\u00c2\u00a0I taught a lesson on the Declaration of Independence to a class of 5th<\/sup> graders.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 After reading the document together, I remember discussing with them how powerful the language was \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness\u00e2\u20ac\u0153.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t we lucky to live in a country that staked its independence on such honorable words?\u00c2\u00a0 Shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t we all feel inspired by the empowering ideas of the founders of our country?\u00c2\u00a0 Yet after the lesson was completed I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t feel lucky or empowered, I felt unrequited. Something was missing from our discussion of the document. After a week of dissecting the text in detail to make sure the students understood the difficult vocabulary and comprehended the reasons for and significance of the declaration, my students could retell the Declaration, but it still seemed to be just words on paper to them.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 A part of me couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t help but wonder\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t there something more?<\/p>\n

That lesson took place my first year of teaching and has haunted me since. \u00c2\u00a0When I taught that lesson, not one of my students in my classroom was white.\u00c2\u00a0 While the Declaration states, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153all men are created equal\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, the document was written with only white property owning men in mind.\u00c2\u00a0 Our country was founded on inequities and a paradox of democracy.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Did the children of my classroom not deserve the chance to know and debate this paradox that has dominated American history?\u00c2\u00a0 I suddenly realized I had been so steeped in my own culture it was unbelievable – and this brew of \u00c2\u00a0tea was in a HUGE cup.\u00c2\u00a0 It included my school with its yearly trips to learn about the heroes at the Alamo (where Mexicans are portrayed as brutal tyrants and Texans as heroes and left from the tour is the economic and social displacement that Latinos endured thereafter), it included the district with its Instructional Planning Guides loaded with materials and ideas where students are not challenged to think critically (did you know that “testing genre” is a unit of study?) , and it included the state and national politicians who see nothing wrong with providing my Latino and African American students with a textbook that presents a history interspersed with only a few key biographies of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153women and people of color”( where was Ceasar Chavez and Sarah Grimke alongside other historical visionaries such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson?).<\/p>\n

I, like many, have spent most of my 28 years defining and redefining myself.\u00c2\u00a0 But it took a group of 10 year olds who were nothing like me to make me realize who I really was. As educators we have a responsibility to realize our own identity.\u00c2\u00a0 More importantly, we also have a responsibility to facilitate the process of our students finding theirs.<\/p>\n

Why I chose to go on this journey this summer:<\/span><\/p>\n

As educators, we are blessed with an amazing opportunity \u00e2\u20ac\u201c shaping the future.\u00c2\u00a0 That is worth changing for.\u00c2\u00a0 Many teachers, myself included, can fall into a state of inertia when we close our eyes to what is going on around us.\u00c2\u00a0 The needs of the students should be the driving force of an educator.\u00c2\u00a0 Their ethnicity, language background, neighborhood, and family situation all play a significant role in how they will learn and what they will respond to.\u00c2\u00a0 Being aware of the larger context of education is also crucial to change.\u00c2\u00a0 From school administration to state and national education policy, to global issues \u00e2\u20ac\u201c being alert to outside factors that affect your classroom and realizing how to adapt to or combat those factors is essential.<\/p>\n

Teaching myself and my students to think globally will help us both to be more critical and compassionate thinkers.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0My hope is that this experience this summer will help me to continue down this road of learning.\u00c2\u00a0 I owe it to my students as their teacher, and I owe it to myself as a person.<\/p>\n

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world-<\/em> <\/em><\/strong>Paulo Freire<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n


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<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Habari Gani? Welcome to my blog! \u00c2\u00a0My name is Laura Landstrom and I am a 4th grade teacher living in Athens, GA. \u00c2\u00a0I am traveling to Africa this summer under a Fulbright-Hays Scholarship with the US Department of Education and the University of Georgia in Athens. A little about me: I received my undergraduate degree […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lauralandstrom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lauralandstrom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lauralandstrom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lauralandstrom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.lauralandstrom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.lauralandstrom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.lauralandstrom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}