Hello! My name is Lisa Beach. I graduated from Lees-McRae in December 2009 and enrolled in the Reading Education MA the following summer. I have not been offered a permanent position yet, so I am working as a substitute teacher for Burke County Public Schools. I have had two temporary positions this year in Pre-K (from October thru June), so I have stayed busy. Of course I would prefer to have my own classroom, but I enjoy being a substitute and going into many different classrooms. When I go into a new classroom, I always look around the room to notice how neat, organized, and practical the classroom is set up, and I like to get ideas for bulletin boards. Some teachers are so creative (much more creative than I am)! :)
I do not recall how I began reading and writing, but I know that school in general has always been “easy” for me. Although I have always been a fluent reader, I’m really not that into reading. There are many things I would rather do than to sit down and read a book in my spare time. However, I know that it is important that my students want to sit down with a book and read it, so I use read aloud time to try to capture their interests and get them hooked on reading.
About the time I was in the second grade, I began to notice that school wasn’t always easy for everybody else. I noticed a difference in the classroom reading groups- my group read perfectly fine without any assistance, another group needed some assistance because they had difficulty sounding out words and read at a slower pace, and the third group needed more assistance, read even slower, and they had to read easier books. Teachers thought they were fooling us with cute group names like the blue jays or red robins, but we all knew what it meant if you were in a specific group. Throughout my school years I always wondered why things were easy for me, but not for others. How are we different? That is what led me to this graduate program. I wanted to learn about the processes of learning to read and write, how to diagnose problems in either process, and how to correct or improve the problems.
Literacy is at the core of the curriculum, and I believe that this program will help me be a better teacher. As a teacher, it is my responsibility to help my students become the best readers possible. Reading is involved in every content area, so naturally a student who has difficulty reading will struggle in other areas as well. Improving a student’s reading skills will increase his/her chances for success in school, and in society.
Lisa Beach