My Favorite Classes at Miami

I can’t just pick one favorite class, since I’ve liked a fair majority of the classes that I have taken, but I still have liked some more than others.

So far, my favorites have been EDT 190 (Introduction to the Teaching Profession), ENG 141 (Life & Thought In American Literature), EDT 246A (Foundations of Language and Literacy), and JRN 101 (Introduction to Journalism).

Part of the reason why I liked EDT 190  was because as part of that class, I was able to do service learning. I was in a 5^th grade classroom and the teacher I was paired with, had me take students to the library and I would work one on one with the students on math and science.

While I’m not one for math and science, this was still a good experience for me, as it reaffirmed that I had chosen the right major. I took this class during second semester of my freshman year and I switched my major in the middle of first semester. Being in the 5^th grade classroom made me sure that I made the right decision to switch majors.

In addition, during EDT 190, I was given the opportunity to do a lot of self-reflection on my work and why I want to be a teacher. We also had to do a group project where we taught the class a chapter from our textbook.

Picture I took while writing a paper for my ENG 141 class.

In ENG 141, which I also took the second semester of my freshman year, we looked at American literature from the colonial period through 1865. We covered some of my favorite pieces of American literature during this class and we also read a lot of poetry, which is something I don’t mind reading and analyzing.

I thoroughly enjoyed this class and I always had fun writing the papers (I know, who has fun writing papers?). This class pushed me to think more and analyze literature in a deeper way than I had before.

I took EDT 246A this past semester. For this class, I learned more about how to teach and it was a great experience since there were only 10 of us in the class, so we really got to share our ideas with each other and learn from one another.

It was in this class that I had my first experiences writing lesson plans, which is now something that I know I enjoy doing.

As for my JRN 101 class, my professor only assigned us two main articles over the course of the semester, but he would also have us go out and interview complete strangers on campus about random topics, for example, their favorite song.

For the first article assignment, I wrote an article about a ride along I did with the Miami University Police Department. Going on the ride along alone was an interesting experience, but it was fun to actually be able to write about what I saw.

In general, I’ve had fairly good experiences with classes at Miami, and I’m especially looking forward to taking a Shakespeare class this coming semester.