Elementary Education Essay Research Paper Buscaglia ReflectionWhile

Elementary Education Essay, Research Paper

Buscaglia Reflection

While reading Leo Buscaglia.s book, Living, Loving & Learning, I was able to reflect back on some of the experiences I have had in my life that have helped to make me the person I am today, and I was able to look into the future at what I would like to become. I was able to see how well I know myself and what I have to offer others. I was able to see the things I don.t like about myself and determine some of the ways I can make myself better. This is some of what reflecting on my life and looking ahead while reading Buscaglia has taught me.

A. .You Cannot give to anybody what you do not have..

I went to Juab High School in the small town of Nephi, Utah. Like many other small town high schools, football coaches and P.E. teachers doubled as Algebra teachers and Science teachers. This allowed our school to make full use of the limited teachers and resources that it had. There was a lot of talented people that taught at Juab and some of them made great teachers and coaches, but some of them didn.t. Sometimes it ended up that the football coach/algebra teacher cared a little more about tomorrow.s football game than he did about ensuring his algebra students knew how to balance equations, and sometimes the P.E./Science teacher cared a little more about the teaching the tennis unit than she did about teaching the four life processes.

Those teachers were also the ones that had to relearn the algebra and science lessons a few days before they taught them to us, because on paper they were qualified to do the job, but as far as knowing the material and having an interest in what they were trying to give to us, nothing was there. Have you ever tried to get someone excited about a subject that you knew nothing about. Have you ever had a math teacher that sent you across the hall to get help from someone else because he didn.t understand what he was trying to teach you. It can be pretty hard sometimes to get excited about something if your teacher doesn.t get excited about it. These teachers tried to give us something that they didn.t have.

When I was in middle school I had another teacher that tried to give us what she didn.t have. She was the health teacher, but because of some addictions to drugs, she really wasn.t very healthy. It was sad, because she taught us from the book that certain drugs are addictive and we should take care of our bodies. We knew that she knew this information first hand because she was always on drugs. Many days she was so buzzed up that the teacher next door would come ask her to hold it down because she was yelling instead of speaking and didn.t even know it. Other days she would fall asleep on her desk while we watched whatever we wanted to on TV. There was more than one time when the stapler ended up in the garbage when the bell rang and woke her up! We all learned how drugs can mess people up because we saw her every day, but I wonder how valuable she thought the lesson would be to us because it was something she obviously didn.t believe in. .You cannot give to someone what you do not have yourself..

Buscaglia makes over and over the point that knowledge and love are both things that we can gain and gain, yet we are able to share them with others without ever depleting our own supply. Because as teachers we need to have the skills to teach our children to love themselves and to become the best they can be, I think it is so important that we dedicate the time that we have for living, to loving and learning. I am going to become the best Valerie that I can be, because then I can give others the knowledge and the love to become the best Johns, Kates and Ashleys that they can be.

B. Risk Taking

Buscaglia tells us the importance of being ourselves. For me, sometimes being myself means taking a risk. All of us have our own little views of what we think others see as being .normal,. and we all have innate tendencies to try to either fit into the category of normalcy or to totally go against what the crowd is doing just to be different.

I lived in Salt Lake for one month. At the restaurant where I worked there was a wide variety of people. One of my friends had a mild case of schizophrenia and was haunted by his inability to deal with reality. If he went into the grocery store and saw a group of people laughing and joking, he automatically thought that they were laughing at him. As a result of his paranoia, he had a hard time making close friends and as a result of that made himself an easy target for peer pressure. He would do anything at all to feel accepted by others, simply because he wanted so much to be what he viewed as normal.

Another guy I worked with there seemed like your average everyday Joe… UNTIL one day I saw him when he wasn.t at work. He had rings in several parts of his body, and was wearing a great deal of hardware over his leather clothes. I barely recognized him! I said .Mac! Is that you..

He started laughing at me and said, .You should have seen me before I got my job. I used to have a blue Mohawk!. When I asked him why he dressed that way and had blue hair he simply replied, .just to be different..

I.m not so sure that making ourselves a target for peer pressure or having blue hair and a pierced upper lip is what Buscaglia meant when he said we should take risks. I