Nuggets of Knowledge from EDUC 377

While doing work in the library this morning, I saw an overturned chair near a table of books and papers with the culprit no where to be seen in the vicinity and immediately realized that it was almost finals week. While a great deal of angst comes with meeting deadlines, the ominous approach of finals week, and what the future holds following graduation, it's also a relief to have come this far.

If I had to commend one thing about Gettysburg, I would choose the opportunity to design your own major. I often hear my peers complain about their courses and how a lot of material is irrelevant to their interests and future career goals. While I admittedly have done my share of complaining about some of my courses, the fact that I chose all of them for my major based on expectations of the courses shaping my major into something meaningful creates an immense feeling of enthusiasm and passion. Anyone who knows me could tell you that they have ceased asking how I am and started asking about my thesis because it has worked its way into almost every conversation I have had since my proposal. 

>> to interject with a little humor, one of my friends shared this with me recently: 

23 Signs You're In a Relationship With Your Senior Thesis

The cool thing about most of my classes, is that they each have played a part in the shaping of my thesis. I think that with the approach of a specific, yet broad major, I had the tendency to find little puzzle pieces of interesting information from each class that led to a further understanding of the topic and the shaping of my opinions. For my Education Policy and Politics class, I started off thinking that there was no way I would particularly learn anything completely relevant to major or thesis because I was not focused on education, nor do I have any interest in pursuing a career in the education field. It was an assumption I made unfairly, as I actually got more out of the course than I anticipated. The discussions we had about education reform, about the role education plays in the functioning of society as a whole and how these two ideas are interconnected sparked a revelation of the role institutions play in a child's life and how this role influences how the child interacts with the environment. Additionally, I gained insight on the concept of change. While this may be to a disadvantage in some ways, I have a slight obsession with change and why it does not occur. Learning about policy and politics and how they significantly impact education knocked me off my high horse of presumptions, for lack of a better description. While I had believed that if there was problem for which one had a solution, then the solution should clearly be to employ it prior to taking this class, I discovered that it was not that easy and that the involvement of other institutions and constituents that created a whole new dynamic of interests to be dealt with. 

More specifically, a whole new element to my thesis from this class has been ruminating in my head since it was discussed in class -- which is defining a child's best interest. Although I have always conceived of a child's best interest in a legal context, I never thought of it in an educational context and it has introduced this idea that not only are the education and legal systems institutions intended to provide support for a child, but that their ideas of a "child's best interest" differ. Essentially, what I initially perceived as a distinctive term was a bit more versatile across different institutions, i.e. schools were designed in the best interests of the child, but the constantly evolving policies and political differences create an ambiguity with the best interests of the child. 

Of course this only adds more complexity to the understanding of the topic, but it does add an additional perspective worth considering.