At the beginning of this school year, I thought that I understood myself and my areas of challenges pretty well. I have always considered myself to be a reflective person. However, though I believe I did come in with the strength of being able to self-reflect, being an LC has allowed me to be in different situations and to test my knowledge of myself. I’ve been able to work with so many different types of people as a result of being an LC, and I have been able to see how I react and interact with people. I feel like I have become more conscious of how I present myself to people. I have learned how to switch myself into a mode of being more of an extrovert compared to my natural tendency to be an introvert. I have built relationships with my fellow Mason students that come to L-TEAM meetings and volunteering at Hampton Middle School. I have discovered that though I might not also be the most extroverted person and probably the least in most situations, I can still be extroverted and use that skill to make connections with others. I have experienced situations where I used the flexibility I have learned from being LC to help me get rearrange the plan without panicking.
One of my aspirations for the near future is to be an English as a Second Language teacher, so I am currently taking a practicum class where I teach six times. When I had my second teaching experience, my professor came to observe me. My professor’s observation made me pretty nervous. I think that nervousness translated into me thinking that the class ended at 10:10 instead of the actually ending time 10:20. So I thought that I had spent so much time on the beginning of the lesson, that I hadn’t even gotten the students to do the activity that was the main point. However, even as I thought I was running out of time, I was able to not rush the lesson, but change it in a way that the students still experienced what I wanted them to. I don’t think I would have been able to do that before becoming an LC. That ‘quick on my feet’ flexibility came from being able to experience all the workshops that I got to lead or co-lead as an LC. There is always something that happens unexpectedly, people are late, there are more people or less people than predicted and many other changes. Even in the TESL teaching experience, when I learned that I had ten more minutes than I thought, I was able to re-expand the activity easily by adjusting the number of questions the students were answering.