I believe that the purpose of education is to educate bright minds and to spread kindness to students when they don’t always get it, but also when they do always get it. When I was growing up, I had the most supportive parents (and still do), but it was amazing to have the teachers who treated me like their own. I want to be able to be that for others. I want to be able to plant a seed in them with education, but also be a beacon of light for when they need it. Education is more than just learning, it is about having a relationship with the student. It is about knowing your students are safe and knowing that they are being loved and places other than the classroom.

My dream job is being a first grade teacher, and getting to work at the school I grew up in. It's name is Bells Elementary, and it helped shape me into the person I am today. I would love to get to work as a first grade teacher for a couple of years, then move into special education.

One connection that I have with standards is going through elementary school, and wondering why I was learning the things that I was learning. Knowing what standards are and what they do is so important.

The second connection that I have with standards is knowing how we help students with them. We need to be able to know fully what we are teaching about so we can teach our students to the best of our abilities.

The third connection that I have with teaching is making my first lesson plants. It gave me a good sense of what I will be doing for the rest of my life, and it is so important that we give our full effort.

One connection that I have to motivation is I have a lot of natural intrinsic motivation. I really want to do well on everything that I can do, and that is enough motivation for me to be able to do that. Obviously, at times, I struggle with it, but also it just takes a little bit of time and them I'm back to normal.

Another connection that I have is an example of an interview that I had with someone just last week. She is a family friend of ours, and she said that as her students do well on a certain testing website that she uses in her classroom, they get skittles. This is an example of extrinsic motivation because the students want to do better because they are getting a reward out of it.

The third connection that I have from this is how important it is for our students, along with the teacher to have motivation. Wether it's intrinsic or extrinsic, it is so important that we have it to allow ourselves to be the best we can be.

One connection that I have with assessments is that I am terrible at standardized testing. I liked it when my teachers used other types of assessments to test our knowledge, whether it was games, writing an essay, etc.

The second connection is understanding that not all students will understand things at the same time, and we need to work with them during assessments.

The third connection is about how we need to understand assessments is how we also need to do better as teachers if students struggle with assessments. They need to understand that we struggle too, and it's not just on them.

One connection that I have to this is that I am really bad at math. I have to take several different routes to be able to get to the way I can understand it. There should be many different strategies to being able to learn something, and once you find a way that you can understand it, you will be able to remember that forever.

The second connection that I have is knowing I can do many things if I take my time and find out different strategies.

The third connection is that I know I can help students learn different strategies to help them learn what is best. It helps them learn in the best way for them.

The first connection that I have is what I am using right now. Padlet is technology that I am using for an assignment for a class for my major. It just all circles back to what I need to complete my major!

The second connection that I have with technology is the ability to learn things in different ways. Sometimes I don't learn things the first time I learn something, but after searching different ways to do something, I understand it better.

The third connection that I have is the ability to teach students about technology. We need to be able to teach students how to use the internet, especially in this day and age.