Journal Five - Brooke

The Hobart Shakespeareans is a very inspiring documentary about an elementary school teacher who uses his own unique teaching style to allow his students to learn to the fullest extent. He uses a variety of exercises and activities to get his students to visualize something to answer his questions whether it be an extended math equation or the states that border another. He stresses the importance of history and clues them in to reality and doesn’t shelter them from death and other morbid topics the way that most schools try to do. Most schools try to “keep it clean.” This teacher teaches them how the world is and he has them read controversial books like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or To Kill A Mocking Bird because they are important books to understand. He gives every student the same opportunity and guides them to be themselves instead of letting society dictate their lives and tell them what to wear, how to style your hair, and who to be. These students connect themselves to his lessons and connect themselves emotionally to a character in a book. When they don’t understand something, he will happily explain it five hundred times over. These kids read and act with great enthusiasm to bring the story to life rather than being monotone like in most classrooms when students are asked to read a passage aloud. His biggest fear is that these kids will grow up to be ordinary, so he makes the class energetic and exciting get students to engage in activity, love the language and use their imagination. He urges them to strive to reach their goals. When responding to a question about how he learned from his teacher, Damien says, “knowing lines is easy, learning character is hard.” This quote may be ambiguous but what I took from it is that it is easy for people, especially kids, to follow a script. The writer has a pattern, and it’s easy for people to fall right into it. It’s easy to fall into a routine that is somewhat “cookie-cutter,” but learning your true self and figuring out how to fit into society is hard. It reminds me a lot of the scene in the movie Dead Poets Society when John Keating took his students to the courtyard to teach them about conformity. Keating asks students to simply walk. They start at their own pace but little time goes by and they quickly fall into rhythm with each other. Keating then makes this interesting and important speech, “I brought them up here to illustrate the point of conformity. The difficulty in maintaining your own beliefs in the face of others...We all have a great need for acceptance, but you must trust that your beliefs are unique, your own. Even though others may think them odd or unpopular.” I think this speech really sums up what Rafe is doing in his classroom, providing a welcoming environment where all ideas are accepted and go without judgement, and encouraging them to be unique.

My main goal at this point is to find a major. I have a few different majors that I am interested in but am having a difficult time choosing one. I am stuck between physical therapy, oncology, and sport industry/management. After 13 years of cheerleading, I have broken many, many bones and racked up multiple other injuries that have caused me to go through several rounds of physical therapy so I have picked up many techniques from my physical therapist and my athletic trainer and I enjoy practicing them even with the circumstance of my own injury. I am also interested in oncology because I have lost several family members and a handful of friends to cancer, so it is something that is important to me emotionally and I am interested in treating patients with it. In my free time, you can find me watching a game of some sort. I am usually always doing something with sports, whether it be watching (really only the five major sports: baseball, basketball, hockey, football, and soccer) or creating excel sheets, doing team and individual stats, and keeping up with trades and new rules. I have been around and participated in different sports throughout my whole life so I really have a passion for them and would love to continue doing what I love and earn money while doing so. Since I am already doing much of the job required for sport industry or sport management, there is the least amount of sacrifice with picking that major. Physical therapy and oncology would mean I would have to spend a lot of time studying and learning medical terms and less time watching sports and doing stats. I hope to make a final decision before transferring to main campus next fall.