Attitude of Gratitude - Blogger Challenge, Day 3

November 3: What are you most proud of to date in your teaching career?

To date, the thing that I am most proud of in my teaching career is that I finally earned a master's degree. To be specific, it is a Master of Science degree, in Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment. I did it virtually, through Walden University, and I did it without accumulating a lot of debt. I started my program in the fall of 2007, after a lot of soul-searching, and finished 19 months later in 2009. Graduation was in Minneapolis, and while I wasn't sure I was going to fly out and walk, in the end I did, and I'm glad I did.

Ho, hum, some might say. Isn't a master's degrees what everyone is supposed to have? I could have earned one way back in the late 1970s, when I was earning my standard teaching certificate. However, back then, having a master's degree could cost you a job, with school districts setting the salaries, but the biggest drawback for me was that I had no idea what I wanted to earn it in. I was set on being a school librarian, and anything offered at the small state college I was attending didn't offer a master of library science degree. I did the next best thing and earned an educational media endorsement instead. After that, cost was a huge factor, as well as any program would have required travel (I had a young son), as well as the idea that $25,000 was just too much on my part-time salary. When the Walden program came up, I cautiously jumped.

What the master's degree did for me was put new energy into my career. I've been a librarian forever; for me, running the library is easy. As my supervisors gave me classes to teach, I needed to step up my game. About the time I earned my MS, I was selected to participate in a two-year grant called Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT). Now, I got to put my lessons from Walden together with technology. I have completely changed the way I approach teaching. I see myself as more of a facilitator. I believe in Constructivist Theory. I expect my students to use the tools that I know they will be using in their futures. Somewhere along the way, I turned into a high school teacher, which still slightly freaks me out!