A Little About Me

My name is Mikayla. I like snowboarding, a lot. I'm also a pretty avid rock climber (thanks to my husband) and I am trying to enjoy running. A lot of people ask me if my hair is naturally blonde. The answer is yes, and I've never dyed it. Unless you count the time in fourth grade when my friend Megan used hair spray hair color on a chunk of my hair and made it black. It was very difficult to get out.
I love reading and writing, that's kind of why I want to be an English teacher. Everyone says to pick something you love to do for your career and I think I'll be a pretty lucky girl if I get to talk about books and writing for the rest of my life. I think English is important because it is so applicable to every day life. Any book you read you can take away something from it that can illuminate a part of your life. Writing is also important, you cannot survive in our world today unless you can write. I want to instill a love for language and literature in my students' lives through my teaching. I had wonderful English teachers growing up, and that is what they did for me.
My current definition of literacy is being able to read, understand, and think critically about a text as well as understanding to social cues, nuances and underlying intent. For me true literacy is more than just understanding the words on a page, it is understanding that the words are sarcastic or sad, their tone.
Literacy and English go hand in hand. English requires literacy and we teach it directly in English classrooms. English is so much about reading as well as analyzing, literacy is so important to be able to do those things.