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Mary Kate Bosson

Ms. Sherrell

Teaching as a Profession 1

20 January 2016

All About Me Bag Project

This project focuses on what elements of a person make them different from others. Each

student created a bag that they decorated in a way that represents them. The bag was filled with

items that represented 5 different categories of their lives: family, student body, larger

community, teacher cadet, and complete person. Then, each student presented their creations as a

representation of themselves. However, this project was not only meant to help other students to

get to know their classmates. It was also instrumental in helping the student get to know

themselves. It is important to know ones self in order to understand ones purpose in life and be

able to create goals in accordance to this purpose.

On the outside of my personal bag, I addressed two major facts about myself. Firstly,

through a picture of a mathematical equals sign, I expressed that I am a strong believer in

equality, particularly gender and racial equality. I also added a picture of the Christian cross to

represent the importance of my faith to me. Inside of the bag, I included photos of my family--

my mother, father, and sister. In addition, I included a tennis ball to represent my dog. I included

these things to represent the importance of my family to me and my love for them. Next, I

addressed organizations Im active in. As for school organizations, I included a picture of me and

some friends at a TASC SGA Conference to represent my involvement in the Student

Government Association and my value of leadership. I also included my official TALONS

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Mentoring organization shirt. This represents my involvement in mentoring freshman and my

love for helping others. As for the teacher cadet element, I had a children's book in my bag to

represent my volunteerism at a program called THRIVE where have helped elementary kids

learn to read after school. This represents my love for volunteerism. For larger community

involvement, I had a picture of the logo for my church, Cokesbury United Methodist, to

represent the importance of my faith to me and how it shapes my values. I also had a band-aid, to

represent my love for volunteering at East Tennessee Childrens Hospital and events that profit

them. This was included to expresses how I value giving back to the community. Lastly, I

included items that represented me as a complete person in the bag. Firstly, I included colored

pencils to show my love of the hobby of drawing. I also included a music CD of The Who. This

expresses my love and appreciation of rock, but more importantly, music itself.

During my presentation, I believe I did well at keeping eye contact with the audience and

holding their attention. I also presented loud enough. However, my pacing was too fast. I also

believe I kept a rather blank facial expression while presenting. I plan to be more expressive to

better engage the audience in the future. Lastly, I will be better with enunciating my diction so

that the audience doesn't have to question what I'm saying.

What I learned about myself is that I actually prefer helping others and volunteering to

other activities such as drawing, watching movies, or reading. Though I never realized it, my

passion is actually to help others in any way that I can. Things such as watching a movie, though

fun, only benefit myself. I have learned that I prefer to use my time doing as much as I can to

help others in order to use my time in a more beneficial way. I also learned that my classmates all

have very differing passions. Before this, I was under the impression that we all would be largely

similar in our life goals and other elements due to the fact that we are in a very particular class
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meant for learning to teach as a profession. However, this is completely untrue. Each person has

a different goal for what they want to gain from this class, a different type of profession they plan

to enter, and different values. Therefore, I realized that our diversity has brought us together,

which is unique.