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All throughout high school I had the opportunity to be involved in my high school theater program. Right away freshman year I decided to get involved because I had loved theater throughout elementary and middle school. The first couple shows I didn’t get major parts because I was young and usually the juniors or seniors got the bigger parts because of seniority. My senior year I was so excited to get leads. However we switched directors that year and the director I had been working with for 3 years retired. I was so sad because I had assumed that I was going to get leads my senior year with that director because he knew me well. This new director had a totally different way of doing things but I was still determined to get the leads I had been promised by my old director. I started off the year strong getting the lead in the play and then the musical came around. It was announced it was going to be Footloose and I was so excited to audition for the part of Ariel, the lead in that show. However I was fighting for the part with my best friend of over 15 years Ella. Ella and I were both equally talented but in different ways. I was a strong dancer and actor while she was a stronger singer than me. I got called back for the part of Ariel and in the call back I made the directors cry with the way I had acted out a scene so I was confident going into the decision day. What I didn't know was that Ella had done amazing as well and this new director had known Ella and her family for over 8 years and so naturally she got the part of Ariel. I felt like a total failure. Everyone was telling me that someday I’d get that lead but it honestly was hard to believe that I was ever going to like theater again. It put such a bad taste in my mouth. But instead of just quitting the musical all together I decided to be supportive of my best friend and encourage her in this amazing role. It was hard to be happy for her but I knew that’s what she would do for me. I think in this situation I had a lot of resilience. Instead of giving up and letting the failure of not getting the lead my senior year define me I decided to instead be a help to all the freshmen and spent a lot of time getting to know the cast because I wasn’t on the stage the whole time like the leads were. I was disappointed when I found out I didn’t get the lead however I didn’t let that ruin my senior year which I’m happy about because my senior year ended up being so amazing without getting that lead!

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Our group project was very successful. We started doing research right away and split it up in a really good way. We decided to study why depression rates are so high in college and the ways in which this college campus, specifically, can be a support for students. I think this is a really good thing to study as college students who might need those services or know someone who might need those services one day. We split up the research by all answering different questions. Instead of using one article to answer those questions we decided to find 2-3 articles that supported that point to make our research more credible. I think we did a really awesome job with the project and we set ourselves up for success by having some backup plans in case our idea of a presentation doesn’t work so in many ways I think we were super prepared! We worked on our presentation together and split up the work of creating the presentation and split up the work of who is going to say what. I think we did a really great job presenting all of our information but I wish we had all looked away from the smartboard more and looked out at the audience and not just read off the presentation.

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Daily fails were opportunities we were given in class to fail at small tasks and learn through those failures or successes.

Card house:

In one of our first classes our daily failure was to make a house out of cards. My group really struggled and didn’t even get two cards to stand up on each other. It was so hard and I’m not really sure why. Some groups were able to work together much better than mine and I wasn’t really sure why. We didn’t work together well and we had zero resilience. We tried once and then gave up because we didn’t really care, which was definitely the wrong way to look at the activity. After this activity I think my group was more willing and had more resilience, the ability to come back after a failure, with other activities which is definitely a good thing.

Unscramble the words:

In another one of our classes our teacher put up a bunch of scrambled up words on the board and we had to unscramble them. I’m a very visual person so in retrospect this activity shouldn’t be hard for me. But again I had no resilience. I tried unscrambling one of the words and when I couldn’t get it right away I gave up because why try when there's no grade attached? That’s been my thought process through most of this class but I’m realizing that this class could actually be helpful and I could actually get something out of it if I was more willing to have an open mind. After this activity I started having a way more open mind, a growth mindset, to the class and it’s actually helped me a lot more than when I had the idea that if it’s not for a grade it doesn’t matter.

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The learning challenge was something my professor encouraged us all to do throughout the semester. The goal was to learn something new or improve on a skill so we can learn how we make goals and the importance of those goals. Another really big part of this assignment was the knowledge that we would probably fail in some way and to see the way we respond to that failure and how we move on from it.

For my learning challenge I choose to learn around 30 new asl signs. I took an American sign language (asl) as a foreign language my junior and senior year. I loved it so much. The people in the class are some of my best friends and the teacher who taught asl kind of changed my life. I could talk to my friends who were also taking the class and practiced a lot outside of class. As a future special education teacher learning asl is really important to me because there might be a time in my career where I will have a deaf child in my class and I would like to be able to communicate with them a little. However I was realizing I was forgetting asl throughout summer and wanted to spend some time practicing and learning new signs and this was a perfect opportunity.

We were encouraged to make a SMART goal and I made a goal of learning 30 new asl signs by the end of the semester. I kind of failed on the part of learning 30 new signs because as I was watching videos and looking up different lessons I was realizing I do actually know a lot of signs and I’m above the basics but what I realized quickly that I needed to work on signing what I was thinking. I’ve realized I’m really good at watching people sign and understand what they are saying but I needed to work on signing a sentence and putting together ideas. I set myself up for success in many ways but I struggled because I didn't have as much time as I thought I had and spent my free time studying for other classes. I had a backup plan because my original plan was to learn 30 new signs but I fixed that and used my backup plan. My backup plan was to practice my signing and that’s what I chose to do so in the end having that backup plan kind of saved me from failing completely!

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In the midterm I only got two questions wrong. The first one I got wrong discussed how when learning a new concept you need to be prepared to be asked questions. At first I thought the answer was the Warren Harding effect. The Warren Harding effect refers to a president that was elected by lots of people solely for the fact that he looked presidential but he actually turned out to not be a great president in a lot of people's eyes. I thought this might be the correct answer because a lot of times we believe our teachers because they look “scholarly” or smarter than us but in the end they're human and can make mistakes and not know what they’re talking about. As students we need to trust our professors but also be their critics. We need to check that what they’re saying is factual and not blindly believe them. However the Warren Harding effect was the wrong answer the correct answer was that the scenario provided an example of the Feynman technique. The Feynman technique is a way to learn something and to master a concept. The idea is that you should teach it to a child, so you can simplify your explanation. I do understand how this was the correct answer because if you can teach the concept to a child and simplify it for their brain you can answer almost any questions about that concept that are thrown at you.

The second question I got wrong asked “Which of these is not a good reason to set up systems instead of relying entirely on goals? I answered that goals are hard to follow up on. For me this is very true. When making goals I struggle to follow up on them and instead make a thousand new goals for another thing and don’t get to that original goal. However this wasn’t the correct answer. The correct answer was that all famous success stories were achieved entirely through the purist of goals. This answer does make a lot more sense. When people start a business or want to create a new concept for people to learn it always comes from a goal they had either from themselves or a goal they had for society as a whole. I guess I totally didn’t understand the question but now reading it over again I can see why this is the right answer.

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My name is Madelyn Schepp and I’m a freshman at the University of Wisconsin LaCrosse and I’m majoring in elementary/middle education and special education. I’m from a small town outside of Milwaukee called Greendale. I grew up there from when I was born until now! I loved living there and I loved the high school I graduated from. I really enjoyed the fact that everyone in my town was someone that I grew up with, the people who I graduated with were the people I sat next to in my kindergarten classes. In highschool I was heavily involved in the theater and music program and my senior year I was head senior of my theater program which meant I was in charge of planning and running events for the theater department and in charge of all the fundraisers for the program. It was super hard at times but also really fun and very rewarding. In high school I was involved in my church and taught kindergarten Sunday school from 7th grade to senior year! In the summer at my church I ran a week long camp for kids ages kindergarten to 6th grade. For the past three years we’ve had over 100 kids come to camp. I love planning the camp along with organizing the volunteers and games for the kids. It is definitely something that has pushed me to be who I am today and towards the career I’m now focusing on. I’m excited to continue with my education classes and learn more about how to be a good teacher!