My Most Significant Education Moment Report

My most significant education moment is actually a string of moments over the course of five months, during my time student teaching at YMCA Camp St. Croix. I had the opportunity to help students learn about the world around us as well as the opportunity to learn how to teach and how to interact with young people in a more meaningful way. From January to May of 2017, I refined my values and beliefs concerning teaching and became extremely excited to begin my education on educating. This was not my first time at Camp St. Croix—I had been going to Camp every summer since 2004—but this was my first time there for Outdoor Education. It was an entirely new experience for me, and it allowed me to explore my deepest intellectual passion: natural
Croix also instilled values of patience, understanding, and creativity in me. There were many occasions, especially during Orienteering lessons, in which students did not understand the concepts or the processes we were trying to explain. When they struggled, I began to feel horribly unsuccessful. This feeling quickly turned into determination. I began working harder with students, trying to figure out where exactly they were getting confused, and even developing alternative curriculum for students who were especially struggling. It was incredibly frustrating, but I had to become patient and understanding, working through the problems with each student. This was not the only time I had to develop a new approach to a lesson, however; at St. Croix, Outdoor Educators are teaching the same lessons to new groups of students every week, and it can get boring to teach the same material week after week. Student teaching taught me how to teach the same thing differently by introducing a new game or activity, or even by reversing the order of the lesson. I was forced to be creative in order to keep myself interested, because I believe it is incredibly important to have a teacher who is excited about the