Personal Reflective Essay: My Educational Experiences

I went into my educational experience with a wealth of background knowledge about a wide range of topics related to academics, relationships, athletics, and religion. I grew up in a small South Carolina town on a block where there were 48 children who played between the backyards and the park across the street. During the summer, we did not come inside until the street lights came on, and we played kickball, basketball, and baseball regularly. We also spent hours exploring a creek a few blocks away, catching tadpoles or frogs and, if we were really lucky, even snakes. Many of the mothers did not work outside the home and included us as they cooked meals or baked. I was in the first class in our school system to go through completely integrated schools from kindergarten through graduation and witnessed the joy and difficulties associated with changing attitudes concerning “separate but equal.” Most of the families on our block were Lebanese Catholic, and even though we were not, we learned about religion from them as we walked with to and from the church almost weekly for their religious education classes. Both sets of grandparents lived on the block next to us. We often ate dinners there where we were taught formal table manners, table settings, and basic etiquette. My mother worked part time at an historic

site just outside of town and after school we often went there to explore the grounds and then ride home with her. We would walk around the ‘dig’ sites and find Revolutionary War artifacts like musket balls, pottery shards, bottles, buttons and more. We traveled, went to museums and National Parks and used our local library regularly. We had encyclopedias at home and were expected to look up information for answers to questions we had about the artifacts or animals we were finding. We often read the encyclopedias for fun, too.
I was fortunate to have had so many academically oriented experiences regularly.

Many experiences that did not seem academically oriented but became such because my parents steered them that way by tying them learning. I know these helped me at school - I vividly remember sitting in a first grade class wondering why the other students did not know things I already knew, like how the astronauts came back to Earth after having gone to the moon and that snakes are not out in the winter. I could not understand, all through school, why some people could not remember what we read or learned in class because it all seemed to stick with me. Now I know

why!
I can’t imagine how my background knowledge could have been improved. Based on Marzano’s chapter, I know we had the quality experiences, language, and economic security (though we were in no way well-off) that gave me an advantage when it came to learning.
If I could tell you one thing to focus on when it comes to background knowledge, it would be to get to know your students. Assess their background knowledge to “design your instruction to specifically meet students’ needs” and target specific learning. The time spent engaging them in activities that build background knowledge is not wasted – it is providing “the glue that makes learning stick.”