The journal begins. We've already been given two assignments for our journals and a lot to think about. Our meetings are very educational and mostly about us individually. I'm learning a lot about myself which I'm grateful for. I think they should have these types of classes for every student teacher right before they are placed in a school. It's a very humbling experience to get to know yourself on the level we go to during the meetings, and it's very eye-opening. I feel like I have already grown a lot in the last month and have gained reassurance that I am going into the right field. I love learning. I love being in school, and I love interacting with other people and hearing from different perspectives.
From our first meeting we were supposed to write about our ascribed characteristics and our achieved characteristics. Ascribed characteristics are ones that cannot be altered and ones that we don't voluntarily choose. They can be described as characteristics that are either "naturally" caused or ones that are caused by nurture, like parenting during childhood. The achieved characteristics are ones that you have gained through experience and events throughout your life. I actually wrote a paper about some of these characteristics in my multicultural education class this past spring semester and attached the paper for details of Jessica Mae on a deeper, more personal level... but here is just the list of characteristics I came up with. They changed a little from what I wrote back in February, but are basically the same.
ASCRIBED:
white, female, blond, LDS, peacemaker, independent, weird/goofy, strong, large-not petite, competitive, tall, creative
ACHIEVED:
artist, athlete, student, outgoing/friendly, leader, service-oriented, sense of humor, hard worker, spiritual
Papelito attached.
Jessica Wilcock
EDSC 445G
Professor Kunakemakorn
February 19, 2014
Autobiography:
How I Got to Where I am Through School,
Friends and With My Fam
I was an introvert when I was younger. I didn’t know that this quality was one to change depending on environment, but it has for me. At home I was the little sister. I followed my older sister everywhere and she made most of my decisions for me. This was so much of my life that my parents actually thought I was possibly deaf or a mute until I was about two years old. My parents also constantly remind me of their first parent-teacher conference with my kindergarten teacher, Ms. Bliss, who told them that although I was a great student there was an issue she would like my parents to discuss with me: I talked too much. Ms. Bliss could barely get me to be quiet during the day and it was a problem. My parents looked at each other in disbelief and asked if my teacher was sure she had the right student, their Jessica didn’t talk at home. There was no way I was a chatterbox at school. But, I was.
I continued this pattern of introvert at home, extrovert at school until I was in the fifth grade. I didn’t play with a lot of friends after school and did well on my own while I was at home. I had two younger siblings and started playing “school” with them in our unfinished basement after real school was over each day when I was about eight or nine, but I liked to draw, read, write, paint and make things out of clay. I was the creative type and enjoyed my alone time to do so. As sports became a bigger part of my life, I started to spend more time with friends outside of school. In fourth-grade Armani Al-Hakeem moved in my neighborhood. She was a fun, creative girl that shared my same birthday and loved art as much as I did so when we would play we were drawing and making things up and being “spies”. I loved that. We were each other’s soul mate-best friends. I tried all different kinds of sports growing up and in doing so made lots of different friends. I didn’t start making any concrete friends until I was in sixth grade and then after that I met the rest of my best friends in seventh grade and have stayed close with all thirteen of them ever since.
Middle school was a fun, eventful time in my life. I was thrilled I could take art classes, have a locker, be at school with my older sister and all of her awesome friends, and I loved having a class schedule, having text books, and more people to make friends with. By ninth grade I had really started to figure out who I was and who my friends were so I was comfortable in my classes and among my classmates. I made the volleyball team at Bingham High School as well as the basketball team this year so that added a whole new schedule to my middle school days. My friends and I were already very involved in basketball when we were in eighth-grade. Every Friday night you would find us at the high school watching our star high school athletes play. There were several times where we went over and helped the head coach in his classroom and listened as he told us stories of past players and about his legendary program of the Bingham Lady Miners. We dreamed that one day he would talk about us that way and couldn’t wait to be in ninth grade and try out for the team.
These experiences and the friendships I made through these younger years of life and of school as well as my athletic career formed a few new characteristics for me. I learned how to be more friendly and outgoing- all of the time. I found out that people liked my sense of humor so I can say that characteristic of being funny and playing jokes developed through these years. I also learned how to work hard and to be competitive. I didn’t know that I liked sports or playing on a team until I was in the eighth-grade. These new friends were all very athletic and all very determined to go big with basketball and even a few had their hearts set on scholarships in volleyball and soccer. It created the desire and determination to make something of myself in the sport’s world and actually taught me to push myself to work harder.
On the academic side of things, I was a fairly good student. I didn’t cause any problems in my classes and although I excelled in math when I was in middle school, it somehow ended up being my least favorite and worst subject in high school...and college. Like I mentioned earlier, middle school was fun for me because I was given the opportunity to have a class dedicated to art. Although I didn’t put much emphasis on this love for art until I was a senior in high school, I think back to middle school and fond memories of the art room come to mind. I actually entered a piece into reflections and won a ticket to the Olympics when I was in seventh grade. I met one of my dearest friends at this event as she had entered a piece in and had won as well. We didn’t meet again until we were in the same dorm rooms our first year in college, but we have remained really close since then as friends and as each other’s nerdy art buddies, as we often refer to each other. Middle school also began my love for English. I had no idea how much I loved reading and writing until I was given the assignment to write essays and study vocabulary words and read for points in my classes. I started to figure out this love when I was in the fourth grade when we were asked to write a short book to be published into hard cover. My older sister also read a lot and would pass on the books she really enjoyed for me to read. I would also write and illustrate short stories for my family members and new baby cousins that were being born as I was in elementary and middle school.
At home, I became really close to my younger siblings, even though I don’t know why they allowed me to “teach” them after school was over every night. My older sister was involved in basketball at Bingham when she was a freshman and sophomore so we would go to her games and obviously see her around the house and spend time together for holidays, but her life was one that I admired and only saw glimpses of when she was around or when I saw her and her cool friends at school, but besides that, I didn’t do much with her. I only pressed my little curious face on the window of her fun, exciting teenage life that “one day I would know all about”. My younger siblings became the pupils in my classroom or a.k.a. the basement or the star actresses in my personal renditions of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella as well as several news casting episodes. This fun little world that only the three of us occupied, (well, there were four of us. We forced participation out of our new puppy Oddie in most of the shows), this time of pretend and imagination came to an abrupt stop when I followed in my sister’s footsteps and made the basketball team as a freshman. This was a bittersweet time in my house. My older sister had been my idol and the main reason I even wanted to play basketball. I loved how close it made her and my dad, and all of her friends and the team parties, and how exciting it was watching her play on the big court at Bingham and wear her matching uniforms, and I loved going with my mom and decorating her locker when she made the team. I tried out because of the example she set and I believe I can chalk up the fact that I made the team that first year because the coaches knew if I could work only half as hard as she did and be half the athlete and I was taller and bigger than her, than they might not regret keeping me. But the year they did decide to keep me to play on the sophomore team, they chose to cut her. That was hard. I remember being excited but then going home and sitting with my sister and her other two friends that had been cut as well as a friend who had made the team but wanted to be there to comfort Britt. A girl on the team actually took over my sister’s number to wear for her for the remaining two years of high school. That’s just the kind of person my sister was. She might have made my decisions for me when I was younger and told me where to go and what to eat, but after seeing stuff like that and watching her put aside her feelings and still come and support me for the rest of my basketball career and be there for me at other events, I was okay with all of that.
My parents were big supporters of education and wanted me to excel in my classes, but I don’t ever remember being pushed very hard with my grades or studying. They were excited and active supporters of my athletic career and because I was excelling in sports I had to keep my grades up if I wanted to play. I believe that helped my parents in never really having to worry about me failing classes. I remember having more late night conversations with my dad about the game than about my academics. That’s where my mom stepped in. I do remember talking with my mom about the books I was reading and the papers I was writing, but I really did a lot of my school work on my own in my room in the basement. I had been on my own in the basement since I was ten years old. That helped with my seclusion and independent development.
When it comes to anything else, however, I lose that pensive, quiet focus, and become the joke of the room and entertaining everyone or just talking to everyone. The only people I can think to accredit this attribute to are my aunts. On both sides of my family. I have a really loud, active, joking, caring, loving family, and when we are all together, it’s hard to hear. What we do instead of taking turns speaking, though, is we just get louder and laugh harder! Each of my aunts are like this. They are all hilarious and fun loving ladies that have taught me to be competitive, how to joke and play jokes, love each other, and play any and all card games you could think of. All of my dad’s sisters, he has four, have played sports and when we all get playing games, the war is on. I learned how to play, have fun, but work hard and win from each of them. My dad is also really loud and outgoing as well, it obviously runs in the family, so because I am like him this way, wherever I go I tend to meet people and make friends. I love to laugh and joke around, and with the friends and family I have, that’s an easy thing to do.
It hasn’t been all fun and games my whole life, however. I went through being bullied when I was in elementary school and not only bullied by other kids at school but by my own “friends”. Somehow I didn’t allow this to affect me for too long and after they had kicked me out of their group, I simply went into my class and asked two other girls I knew if I could be their friend. They smiled and agreed, and because of them I met a whole new group of people and got to excel in my life instead of being scarred by those long, sad days on the playground. I was also overweight most of my life and almost lost my position on the basketball team because of it. I had also been called names and treated differently because I was bigger and weighed much more than most of my friends. I believe this is where my sense of humor amplified and helped me because I usually used my size as a punch line or comic relief in a lot of situations. I don’t know what could have possibly happened had I not been surrounded my good friends and been involved in sports where, save that one experience, being a little bigger helped me most of the time and explained why I was so big and strong. I don’t know what would have happened either if my friends wouldn’t have been as kind as they were and laughed at my jokes and “fat jokes” as I called them.
I believe my involvement in sports, the friends I have, the career path I have chosen with the arts and education, and my family members have helped me become the person I am today. I have learned how to work hard, laugh, play, love, empathize, and compete through all the different places and people I have met. I had certain quiet, independent attributes when I was younger that got magnified in some areas while I learned how to communicate in other ways and share my personality and thoughts through many different ways through my journey this far in my life.
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