Final Blog

Dear Social Issues Class,

Sitting in your seat on the first day of class, I can guarantee that you have no idea as to how lucky you are for the experience you are about to embark upon. I’ll let you know that all I was thinking when I was in your seat was is this class really three hours? As well as I’m definitely not going to make it to every Monday night; I’ll miss my shows. A semester later, though, I didn’t miss a class – oh, and don’t worry – it wasn’t always the full three hours.
From the moment he walks in, you’ll know Dr. Talbert and you’ll never be able to erase his face from your mind (that’s a good thing- trust me). He’ll bring to your attention biases and feelings that you never even knew existed in you, but they do, and they will lead you to your final transformation within the confines of Draper.
Without divulging into a boring monologue about how this class changed my life, my opinions, and me as an educator, I have a few pieces of advice for each of you.
Don’t be self-conscious. We all come from different backgrounds, different families, and such a variety of experiences. Be open to sharing your own – they form who you are and why you believe what you believe. I feel that by my classmates sharing their lives with me, I was enabled to better understand people who are seemingly so similar to me, but underneath completely different. If you are open to sharing your thoughts as well as to hearing others, you will quickly realize that you will be doing this for the rest of your career. These people sitting next to you represent the people you will be working along with side by side in your years as an educator. If you don’t learn how to understand them and compromise with them now, you are only paving a rougher road for yourself in the future.
Do not enter the room believing that your feelings can never be changed. You will be discussing extremely important, personal, and even scary subjects. When race gets brought to the table as a barrier in education today, you may want to squirm in your seat, lock your lips, and close your mind to any opinion that other people have. Let me be the first to tell you – you won’t always be right. If you think that by not listening, you can keep your opinions steady and strong – you’re wrong. This class offers such a safe, friendly environment to put your opinions out into the world with others’ and see what happens. Maybe you’re not entirely right, but that doesn’t mean the kid with the red hat up front is right either; you could both come to realize that there are circumstances that you never even considered, and that you found a completely different meaning to being a good teacher.
This will be redundant; read your books. The books selected for this class are not textbooks. They do provide you with an abundance of knowledge and experiences that you may never have been exposed to, but they are certainly not textbooks. I see these books as guides that I will add to my personal library and most likely return to in the future. Each work has it’s own meaning, which I will let you discover for yourself, but each is equally important. It’s easy to push the book aside and study for the biology exam you have Monday morning, but what’s written in these books should weigh on your heart and help mold you into an amazing educator. You may not agree with each author, and you may even want to say that you hate the book. Here’s the best part – you can. Take it to class; tell your peers why you didn’t enjoy it or find it helpful, and chances are, they will reveal to you something that you didn’t pick up on in the text.
Let this class change you. Don’t lose your morals by any means, but take in this experience. Don’t look at Monday night as a three hour class; look at it as a trip you couldn’t otherwise afford to take. Hey, it’s Baylor, maybe you couldn’t afford it this way either. Good news is, student loans are deferred until your teaching anyway. So sit back, take in your surroundings, lose yourself in the text, and become the educator that you feel will most effectively and beneficially revolutionize the next generation.

Enjoy!
Courtney Weddle