Blog Assignment 1

About Me
Hi everyone! My name is Kaitlyn Burgess, and I am twenty years old and a junior here at South Alabama. I have lived in Mobile my entire life. Although, unlike many people from Mobile who come to South, I came here by choice. I looked at several other colleges ranging from Alabama to Southern Miss, but none of those seemed quite right for me. I realized that it would be too hard for me to be away from my family, so South seemed to be the best option.

As you have probably already guessed, I am extremely close to my family, and I try to spend as much time with them as possible. I am an only child, so it is just me, my mom, and my dad here at home. I think it is really important to spend time with my parents and let them know how much they mean to me considering everything they have done for me over the years.

Anyone who knows me well could tell you that I have a passion for working with children. I am an Elementary Education major, and I cannot picture myself being in any other major. I find everything about children fascinating--the crazy things they say, their enthusiasm for life, and their eagerness to learn. The idea that I can make a difference in the lives of children through a career in education makes me so excited!

Even my current job involves working with children. I coach a competitive cheerleading team as well as teach tumbling classes at Alabama Jags Tumbling, Cheerleading, & All-Stars. The thirty girls on my team this year range from ages six to ten. It has been quite the experience so far, I have already learned a lot about managing a group of children as well as how to handle different ages and personalities. Working with this broad age range has given me an idea of what grade I might like to teach in the future. Right now, I am thinking that I would like either first or second grade because these are my favorite ages to work with.

Finally, I could not write a post about myself without including my amazing friends! I have three of the absolute best friends in the world--one going way back to the preschool days, and the other two from high school. Without these people in my life, I would be miserable. I may technically be an only child, but these girls are like the sisters I never had!

Speaking of sisters, have I mentioned that as of spring semester of 2011 I have over seventy? (Yes, you read that correctly!) I joined Phi Mu my second semester here at South, and it has honestly been the best decision I have ever made. I spend most of my free time with my sisters, and I can not imagine college life without them!

Randy Pausch on Time Management
This is a great video with wonderful insight and tips on time management. There were many helpful tips throughout the video, but one stood out to me at the very end that I think will be very useful for this class. He said to break items on your to do list into smaller steps. An example of how I can use this tip is in the completion of the assignments for next week. Instead of being overwhelmed at the list, I can break it down into smaller, more manageable steps. For example, for Blog Post 2, I can plan to do each of the four parts separately, even at separate times, instead of looking at it as one giant post. I can continue this method for the rest of the tasks for the week.

I also liked how he took breaking down the items on your to do list even further by completing the most undesirable task first and work your way down from there. This is actually how I have always completed my homework since about fifth grade. I learned pretty quick in life that the hardest task seems even worse when you leave it for last!

Time Management
Overall, I have pretty good time management skills, all thanks to my fifth grade teacher. She would put all of our work for each class on the homework board, including everything she intended to be completed in class. She said it was up to us how much homework we would have. It all depended on how we chose to spend class time and free time. I remember figuring out fairly quickly that the more work I crammed into the school day, the less homework I would have. I ended up using this strategy all the way through high school. That teacher really made a difference in my time management skills.

As for the pages I just read, I still found some helpful tips. For me, I think the biggest "take home messages" from these pages are to focus on one thing at a time and avoid time wasters. I know I am guilty of losing focus of what I am doing from stressing over the rest of the list of things to be done that day. Looking at it from a new perspective, I can see that I would be less stressed if I would just focus on the task at hand then move on to the others in the same mental state. As far as time wasters go, I just need to work on limiting them and keeping the end result of tasks in mind.