Practice Blog Post #1

• Who am I?
• Junior at South
• Corpus to Jackson; Private to Public
• Southern Miss. to USA
• Cooper, NICU
• Why do I want to be an educator?
• My original plan
• Private to Public
• Second Grade
• My Passions
• My Family

Who am I? I, Megan Shoultz, am a Junior in the Elementary Education program at the University of South Alabama. Growing up in Mobile, Alabama, I attended Corpus Christi Catholic School, but got a public school experience when I transferred to Causey Middle School around 6th grade. My high school was Murphy High School, but I moved to Jackson, Alabama around my Junior year and attended Jackson High School. After I graduated from JHS in 2012, I attended the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi for two semesters before transferring back to Mobile and the University of South Alabama. The main reason I moved back to Mobile and closer to my family is the birth of my little brother, Cooper Bentley Shoultz, who was premature and admitted into the NICU at USA Women's and Children's Hospital. Being closer to my family, who was staying at the Ronald McDonald House to be closer to Cooper, was a great incentive to the idea of coming back to Mobile. When I first started to attend South, my degree plan was on the path of Criminal Justice and had the dreams of becoming either a police officer or a lawyer.

While my original plan was to become an lawyer or something along those lines, my dream when I was a child was to be a teacher. And armed with the experiences form being both in private and public school systems, I have shaped my ideas on teaching and I hope to draw from both of the experiences to better teach the children of this generation. One of the main reasons, I want to be an educator because of my experiences as a student myself in second grade. I want to help children learn the way my teachers helped me. An educator is meant to guide and help students learn and grow throughout the school year. With the changes of the 21st century, teaching has had to evolve along with technology, which has lead to the growing use of computers and iPads in the classrooms of an elementary school. 

While studying to become a certified teacher at the University of South Alabama, I would like to be able to expand my knowledge of not only teaching methods that are used around Mobile or Alabama but throughout the world and the different types of strategies that would help a student excel. Along with my goal of becoming a teacher being one of my passions, I also hold an enormous part of my heart to my family and my boyfriend (pictured below).