Blog Post #1

Blog Post 1

Greetings! I am writing to respond to the first few weeks of Introduction to Religious Studies at Santa Rosa Junior College.  Overall my experience so far has been different than any of the other "traditional" learning settings I am used to.  I never took any online courses during my undergraduate years at UC Davis, or during my credentialing program at Dominican University.

This online course has been infinitely more challenging that I expected.  I expected to be able to move more freely throughout the course load, and I definitely did not expected to be in a "gameified" classroom.  I will admit that I have not explored that area of the class very deeply yet, but I am looking forward to this!  I hope that I can learn more about this tactic and bring it into my middle school classroom this coming year.

Since I am teaching summer school during the day and babysitting in the afternoons, I tend to leave most of my online course work to the weekends.  I am also taking three other online course, so that I can increase my units and move up the salary schedule at work.  Needless to say, I have a lot going on.  And this class is a lot of work.  So are my other classes.  But, it keeps me busy, which is what I enjoy.

When I was at UC Davis, I attempted to take an upper division Anthropology course.  I remember sitting in the class, listening to the professor talk on the first day.  For the first time in my life, I had NO idea what the person in front of me was talking about.  The ideas she was talking about were too abstract for my concrete thinking.  As I have been completing the reading for this class, I am experiencing those same "What the...?" thought I had during that class.  Also, it doesn't help that I generally approach anything related to religion with a high degree of skepticism.  I took this class to challenge myself, my beliefs, and my thinking - and I can see this class will certainly do so!

Me as I read for this class.