My Personal Goal

I have always viewed curriculum as limiting. It limits students abilities and imaginations. I recently viewed a very interesting speech about education by Shimon Peres, the current President of Israel and former Prime Minister. It is a magnificent speech and it reflects many of my beliefs about education and the curriculum. It is fairly long, but well worth watching. Here is the link:
http://corpvideofs.adpcorp.com/video/jw/peres_400kb.wmv
In terms of my view of learners, I share similar beliefs with Charles Murray, author of Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality.” In this book he talks about the unrealistic goal of teachers being able to make every student capable of graduating from a four-year college, considering the bell, and how that simple truth is being ignored in NCLB. I share his belief that we are doing some of our students a misjustice by not letting them pursue their natural talents and use their individual skills by making them adhere to a ridgid curriculum.
In terms of how I view my role as an educator, I have been unable to separate out my role as an OT from my role as a teacher. I feel compelled to treat (teach) the whole person. There are times when a handwriting lesson must be suspended to address an episode of depression stemming from PTSD because I feel a student can’t learn when they are preoccupied with serious issues that they consider more important than the goal of their current lesson.
However, since beginning this course (actually since beginning the first UDL course) my thinking has shifted. I wouldn’t say my beliefs have shifted, but I have become more optimistic that I can find ways to reach many more of my students through UDL. Taking all of this into consideration I would say that my goal for this course is that I will implement what I am learning into my practice by training my thinking to always applying UDL when writing my goals, and planning the materials, methods, and assessments for my students, and advocating for my students by sharing this information with the classroom and special education teachers of my students.

Finally

Hi Diane, Finally figured out what I was doing wrong. I guess I not only had to go to the link, but I also had to accept the invitation to post. Silly me. We are all learning here! I have used blogger, but I normally use WordPress, so I'm not that familiar with the ins and outs of this one.

This is really nice. My blog has the same color scheme. Did you enjoy creating this? Is this your first one?

Yvonne

Good for you!

This seems easy to access and post to. Was it? Maybe I should consider this instead of the Google Site.

This is a test post to see if I can post a comment. I went to "new post" at the top right hand corner of the screen to get this window.