Can you please proofread my grad school app?

Prepare a brief, but careful statement regarding the reasons you want to pursue graduate work in this field, your specific interest and experiences in this field, and your career plans.

Over the past four years of my undergraduate career at XXXX I have learned a lot about the field of education, but even more so about myself. In preparing for my role as a teacher, I learned exactly how difficult it is to plan and teach an effective lesson that captures the attention of my students and engages them while they are learning. At the same time, I realized how much I loved it. Becoming a teacher had always been a life-long dream of mine simply because I loved being around children. However, my time at XXXX has taught me to love more than just the children. Now I love reading about different teaching methods, gathering resources, conferring with colleagues, planning activities, and ultimately watching students learn and succeed. My experiences during my undergraduate education have only further instilled my desire to become the best teacher possible.

Some of those experiences have included student teaching, tutoring, and in-class instruction on educational pedagogies. My most memorable student teaching experience took place during the Fall of 2009. I was working in a combined fourth/fifth grade SEI classroom (Sheltered English Instruction) where the native language of my students was Spanish, and the only Spanish that I knew was what I learned in high school four years earlier. It was a scary situation that I was put in to help these students, but it was a challenge that I was ready to face. With the help of my supervising practitioner and additional research on second language acquisition, I was finding myself adjusting to this unfamiliar environment. My patience for working with children was tested and became an important tool to my success that semester. I gradually became more engaged with the children, helping them learn more English vocabulary everyday. At the end of my student teaching, I had become very close with my students and was wishing for more time with them. On the last day the students made me a farewell card written in both Spanish and English. Students who were only speaking Spanish on the first day were now writing me letters in English. It was an experience that I will never forget and one that will continue to inspire me for years to come.

I have also had a lot of tutoring experience to help me prepare for my role as a teacher. I tutored a child in fourth grade, and I also tutored my peers at XXXX. This has helped me learn how to work with people of all different ages, and it has helped me discover how to use similar teaching strategies across a wide range of people.

Finally, the classroom experiences that I have had have shown me several different approaches to teaching. For example, I learned a lot about Backward Design lesson planning, in which the teacher begins with the goal, standard, or objective of the lesson and then plans activities that will meet that goal. I also learned a lot about responsive classrooms. I have found this method of teaching and classroom management to be very intriguing and I am eager to apply this and other strategies to my classroom in the future.

As a result of all of these experiences, I would love the opportunity to continue learning and to expand my knowledge in the field of education. Learning is a continuous and cumulative process, and as long as I have this passion to teach and improve the lives of children, I will continue to grow and seek out practices and opportunities that contribute to the development and growth of myself as an educator and as a person. I feel that XXXXX is an institution that will help me meet these goals as I pursue my career as an elementary school teacher.