7. Presentations, Celebrations and Goodbyes
“Country Roads, Take
me Home, to the Place I Belong“
-
- John
Denver
Time flies. Four
months had gone before I really had realized it, and it was time to present our
inquiry projects which we had been doing during the fall. Indiana Memorial
Union (IMU) is an old, beautiful building on the Indiana University Campus and
in Walnut Room we heard presentations on topics from all over the world: how to
teach deaf students in Botswana, or visually impaired in Morocco? How to
prevent students not to drop-out in New Zealand or how to implement
project-based learning in Taiwan?
My inquiry project was
about learner-centered teaching methods. The goal of my project was to learn
which learner-centered teaching methods used by the U.S. secondary education
teachers have proved successful in enhancing student engagement and motivation.
I described 14 learner-centered teaching methods and gave instructions how to
use these methods. I provided a template for sharing teaching methods among
teachers. Together they form a Toolkit
for secondary education teachers. In addition to that, I created a protocol of
a Fair Share workshop for sharing teaching methods in a school. This material
is free to use and it can be downloaded from my website tarjamykra.weebly.com
After two days of
presentations it was time to receive our certificates. It was a memorable
moment, full of joy and at the same time sadness in the air. The representative
of the United States Department of State
handed our Fulbright certificates and CIEDR from
Indiana University handed us certificates of studies as
part of Fulbright Program. So much learning, experiences, new ideas, great
people and a lot of work was behind these two certificates. For the last time, official
pictures were taken of Fulbright Teachers as a group. Some of the pictures were
more professional than the others...
We met a lot of people
during our stay in Bloomington, Indiana. Now it was time to say goodbye to
everyone. We said goodbyes to our host teachers at the local high school, we
went for a farewell dinner with CIEDR staff who had taken care of us for the
past four months, and we said goodbyes to our host families in Bloomington
World Wide Friends (my host family below). So many goodbyes in three days, so many good memories, so
many amazing moments to memorize. Sometimes we couldn´t help getting a bit
emotional, but it is a natural part of saying goodbyes.
David from New Zealand
and Edmund from Singapore play guitar well and in many evenings we sang songs
at our Evermann Apartments. The Beatles was absolutely our favorite: Hey Jude,
All You Need is Love, Imagine, Yellow Submarine… And we danced! It was so fun!
We got a chance to play one song at a local pub in our last evening. We gathered
at Players Pub, played and sang “Country Roads” by John Denver: “Country Roads,
take me home, to the place I belong”.
It is time to return
home. Oh, but before that, Florida! After a vacation I think I am
ready to return to my “real life” in Finland. However, I wouldn´t mind doing
something like this again in the future. This is the end of
this blog. I was so privileged to have this great opportunity, which made my long
term dream come true. I want to thank everyone I met in the U.S., I will never
forget you. Let´s keep in touch.
Ps. Sorry about all
the mistakes I made with grammar, prepositions, articles etc. while I was
writing this blog. It would have been so
much easier to write it in Finnish, but I decided not to do it. When I was
struggling with words, prepositions and articles, it reminded me constantly the
power and meaning of learning.
