Return
to ES Part-time Stories
Lisa Hoffman
Ph.D. Specialty Area: Literacy Education
5 AM. My alarm goes off. Another morning of another day, and most importantly, another day in my classroom. Most mornings, I wake up and ponder the day's plans, wondering if things will go smoothly, where my students will struggle, how my plans will need to be modified, if discussion will take off or if the room will fall silent (and stay that way). I reflect on the day before, questioning myself, my students, my work. I make a mental list of which parents I need to call, which staff members I need to see; like most practicing teachers, the morning to-do list is invigorating, yet seems endless. 
When the time rolled around to pursue my masters, I knew that I could not give up my morning pondering, and the days that often followed. My kids, my classroom and I are a community, and I knew, without my daily interactions with both my students and my colleagues, that my life as an educator would feel like something was missing.
As I watched many of my high school students struggle day-in and day-out with content area texts, my frustration level rose too; I knew that they had issues with the reading, but had no idea how to help them. Finding ways to aid these students and their other teachers with text comprehension became my passion, and thus the focus of my graduate studies. As I surveyed a number of literacy programs across the country, I knew that I wanted a program that would allow me to not only stay in my classroom during the day, but also offer me a rigorous, research-based program that would give me more than just tools to try with my students the next day. I wanted to know the history of literacy studies, the current issues and research regarding content area literacies and to be able to develop my own ways to help my students based on these studies. The Literacy, Language and Culture Program at the University of Michigan was a perfect match: professors, researchers and mentors that are both leaders in their fields as well as former practicing educators, an exceptionally rigorous and relevant course load tailored to my part-time schedule, the flexibility to participate on research projects and be part of an academic community, even with such limited availability, and, luckily, the campus was close to both my school and my home.
The combination of theory-based readings, discussions, projects and case studies of my Master's coursework with my daily practice has allowed me to fully grow as an educator. Both force me to question my teaching, my students and my colleagues in a much deeper, more critical way than I did before. My conversations and studies here in the LLC program have given me the ability to do this. The program has also allowed me countless opportunities to develop long-lasting and enriching relationships with my professors and fellow students that will continue to impact my thinking on literacy, teaching practice and my professional career for many years to come.
Though the program may seem a little overwhelming at times, the readings, the papers and the extra hours out of school all seem worth it to me now. We are all after the same common goal: to make learning meaningful and accessible to all of our students. The studies provided by the part-time LLC program only makes this goal more of a reality.
Return
to ES Part-time Stories
