Hello everyone! My name is Saniya Uraizee. I am a full time Grade 5 teacher at an independent school in Surrey, B.C. I have been teaching for about 7 years now. ETEC540 will be my tenth and final course in the MET course! I am looking forward to sharing ideas and learning from all of you in this course as well as completing my Masters degree.
For this task, I chose my teacher bag that I take to school everyday. This bag is extremely important to me and I can’t go to school without it as it carries all the things that I need for a typical day of teaching at school. The following items are displayed in the picture:
- My house keys (with an attached P.C. optimum card, keychain given by one of my students, and a keychain from my trip to the Maldives)
- A Ziploc bag filled with sharpies, pens, and highlighters (essentials for teaching)
- Green mechanical pencil
- My pink wallet containing multiple cards and some cash (the wallet was given by one of my former students)
- Cheque book
- First-aid kit which is in the small white box
- Hand sanitizer wipes
- Hand sanitizer in my small pink bottle
- Excel mints
- Compact mirror
- Charging wire for my iphone
- 3 USB sticks
- Small green notebook that I use to take quick notes
- My 2019-2020 agenda/planner
- My purple UBC Faculty of Arts Folder
- Macbook Pro laptop
In terms of technology, the Macbook Pro as well as USBs and charging wire I believe accurately describe my strong bond with technology. I use my Macbook Pro almost everyday at school along with my USBs that store all the documents and materials that I have created or saved throughout my years of teaching. The charging wire describes the importance of my phone. I keep an extra charger with me in case my battery runs out as I also make use of many apps on my phone such as Class Dojo, Outlook, and the school app for class management, to check parent emails, as well as post reminders and announcements for my students.
There are also several items in my bag that feature text that was printed on them using technology such as the PC optimum mini card attached to my keychain, the chequebook that has my name printed on it, the excel mints, my agenda, the cover of my small green notebook that says, “happy,” the cover on the sanitizer wipes and the sanitizer bottle, the “Sharpie” sign on the package of highlighters, the keychain that has the word, “Maldives,” on it and the engraved heart and apple which has my name on it as well as the saying, “Teachers plant seeds that grow forever.” In addition, my wallet also contains many plastic cards that were created using technology.
The only instances of multilingualism that I could visibly identify from the picture was the French translation provided on the packet of hand sanitizer wipes and the excel mints. My wallet would contain more examples of this on cards as well as the Canadian dollars in cash.
I truly enjoyed doing this exercise as I found that you can learn so much about a person just by looking at what items they choose to keep in their bags. The task helped to highlight my personality as well as what items are important to me. For example, I learned that gifts given by my students are important to me and this was identified from the engraved keychain that was given from one of my former students as well as the pink wallet. The hand sanitizer wipes and bottle also accurately describe me. I am a bit of a “germaphobe” and I have this constant need to wash my hands or sanitize. Lastly, organization is extremely important to me and the items that depict this quality of mine quite well are the agenda, my purple folder, and the ziploc bag containing highlighters, sharpies, and pens (yes, I keep them in a ziploc bag like that so they are not all over the place in my bag).
Lastly, I found this exercise also helped with self-discovery. It was nice for me to see that although I love technology and am constantly exposed to digital text in my daily life, I also enjoy the old-fashioned way of reading and writing text in a book or on paper that was not digitally created and instead was hand written. I’d like to think that in a way this reflects who I am as a person and as a teacher (a blend of old and new methods). I believe balance is important and although due to advancement in technologies, students these days choose typing over writing things by hand, I hope to continue teaching my students (in the present and in the future) about the value of handwriting. It is important to remember that what is considered “old” was once considered “new” and what is “new” will one day become “old.” Who knows what types of technologies will be in store for us in the near future? I’m looking forward to finding out!