My most difficult Assignment- Ryan Gaines

My most difficult assignment came from a class that I took during the fall semester of 2017 here at Saint Louis University called “Children’s Literature and Media.” This class may sound very easy but it turned out to be the hardest class that I have ever taken. The specific assignment that I am talking about was a Literacy Reading Journal that in total was twenty-eight pages long. This assignment was not the average journal. The first few pages were filled with categories that needed three books for each from all different levels of reading and various specific requirements. From the beginning, I thought that this assignment would be easy due to the fact that we were given a template for our books as well as guidelines. The stress from the assignment started to catch up with me halfway through the semester as my professor started to remind us that our assignment was due at the end of the semester. She started to outline all of the guidelines once again which broadened the scope of what kind of assignment this actually was. I realized that each one of the about fifty books that I did not have on the assignment yet in their categories needed a summary or explanation on a certain topic. We also had to add just about everything that we did in class or homework into this online journal whether that be in text or photo form. Classes like these and assignments like these shine a light on the fact that the education department is very deceiving to those who do not know about it. Those who are not actually taking this class may look at the name and assume that the class is easy. This is why we should not judge a book by its cover because we as students in the education department block out what others say about the difficulty of our classes and assignments because we have assignments like the Literacy Reading Journal which challenges us to search for books in all different age levels and genres as well as write summaries so that we are prepared for the classroom setting where we will have our own books and text sets. I was able to manage the difficulty of this assignment by setting aside a chunk of time each day to sit down to get a few parts of the assignment finished so I was sure I would have the assignment finished on time. I learned that time management is crucial in the life of a teacher because if I am able to relax while also thinking before I get my work done, not only will I get more work done, but I will feel as if I have learned more to take away for use in my own classroom later on.