ID 601 BLOG

Understanding and Application of Threshold Concept 4: ‘All Writers Have More to Learn’ to First Year Composition. My professor in Creative Writing would almost always leave a comment that went something like “You have got one more thing to work on” on my assignments.  However much I worked on the ‘one thing’, there was always ‘one thing’ to work on on every submission I gave. Though I took this course for just a semester,  at that time, I felt like writing was the hardest class to take since it appeared that I could never excel in it to the extend I desired. Looking at threshold concept 4 “Writers have more to learn” in Naming What We Know by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, my professor’s comments make much sense to me now. Writing cannot be perfected at one go, it is got to be learnt patiently, which calls for time and effort; meaningful effort. The misconception that there are people who are “born writers” has influenced the...

In my junior year as an undergraduate, I did my Teaching Practice (Internship) at a girls school in rural Kenya. I was extremely nervous on my first day of teaching. Though I had undergone three years of pedagogy training, I still felt inadequate. There were about fifty students in the classroom and I could tell from their looks that they were eager to learn. The fact that I knew something that they did not know and that it was my responsibility to deliver it to them was my chief motivation. At the end of the three months of teaching English, I was impressed at the progress each one of them had made no matter how little. The fact that we all had expectations which were fulfilled in one way or another was satisfying. I will always remember the gratitude of the girls’ as I said goodbye to them at the end of my internship. At that moment, I confirmed that this is what I wanted to be; a teacher. It had never felt so right. Upon my graduation, I got a teaching job at a small private ...