Artifacts and Characteristics of the Novice Teacher # 1

The artifact that best represents the first Characteristic of a Novice Teacher is my final inquiry project that I completed for my Reading 422 class. This project reflects that I believe in life-long learning because this is not only a skill that I learned myself, but it is a skill that I can easily instill in my future students each and every year.

With this project, I was asked to read a novel which was also made into a movie. While reading the text, we were asked to come up with a wondering within the book and then we were to inquire about the question to find the answers to our curiosities. Once we began our inquiries we were then asked to inquire about even more sub-questions which would help us discover even more information regarding our topic of interest.

For my own inquiry project I read the book titled Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. This text was about a man who decided to leave his life behind to create a new one that required no money and no plan. The main character hitchhikes his way to the Alaskan frontier and manages to live in the wild for several months. Due to the main topic within this novel, this sparked me to want to learn more information about the Alaskan wilderness and the concept of hitchhiking itself as well. After researching about these inquiries, it enabled me to see this text in a whole new light because I had an even greater respect for the main character who managed to survive as long as he did in the wild.

After completing this inquiry, we also had to watch the movie to see the differences and how well the director implements the topics we inquired about. Once I finished this assignment, I was truly changed as a reader. Now whenever I read, I find myself asking questions about events and places within my novels. This then forces me to want to learn even more information regarding my inquiries and this alone is something that I want to instill in my future students. It is so important to gain interest within one's reading, and by allowing the students to research something within a text that they are intrigued by it engages them fully and gives them power over what they are learning.

Since this is something that effected me so much, I really want to implement this concept into my future classroom. Due to this, I feel that this artifact greatly reflects my ability to show that I can implement life-long learning into my current and future instructional activities. After all, if a person does not continue learning throughout his or her life, then they will never be able to progress with society itself, so this is definitely a skill that needs to be instilled within the students of the future and the students of now.