Jillian's EDU 3650 Blog

  This week's topic was about addictions and drug use, including vaping. The issue of addiction and drug use has been an ongoing issue for decades, but now we have e-cigarettes and vaping to add into the equation. The vaping and e-cigarette issue has been going on for a number of years now, but unfortunately it hasn’t been getting much better. With rules and laws being put in place to try to prevent vaping, it is still a huge issue because teens are still finding ways to get a hold of these products. In general, addiction, drug use and vaping is a really important topic to be educated on for teachers no matter what age.  After watching the short video, “Vaping in Schools. ‘Juuling Is Popular Among Teens Despite Health Risks,'' I can honestly say that nothing came as a shock to me. Being that I went through middle and high school knowing so many people that used vapes, I wasn’t too shocked about what I was hearing when looking at the school in Millford, Connecticut. The te...

This week in class, we went into the topic of social-emotional learning and mindfulness. This is a super interesting topic that I personally feel that we do not hear of often enough. There are so many different benefits to mindfulness whether it is in or out of the classroom, and I think it definitely needs to be recognized much more in the world. We watched a film called Room to Breathe, read articles about mindfulness and also had the opportunity to choose a mindfulness app to work with, talk about and review.  The film that we were assigned to watch this week was called; “Room to Breathe.” The film started off by showing us a classroom with a ton of behavioral issues and other struggles. This San Francisco middle school was very lucky to have a mindfulness teacher come in once a week to somewhat implement a few mindfulness based learning techniques such as meditations. You are able to tell that in the beginning, it was pretty difficult to get it started. But eventually, there w...

In class this week, we educated ourselves on the topic of poverty and homelessness. This topic can definitely be hard for some to read, and it really is heart-breaking to read about. For this week's assignment, we had to watch the documentary, “The Homestretch” as well as read two other articles. There are a couple of things that I learned from this topic. One, for the most part, I think most people are aware of poverty and homelessness being an issue in the United States, but I do not think that people understand the severity of the issue. Poverty and homelessness not only affects adults, but it most definitely affects children as well. We as future teachers need to be educated when it comes to poverty and homelessness, but we also need to be able to accommodate and support our students going through situations like that. While poverty and homelessness can be a topic that you cannot fully understand unless you’ve experienced it, we need to put ourselves in the shoes of others to b...