Introduction

 Hello all! My name is Savannah Taylor and I am from the Rochester, NY area. This is my second semester at SUNY Empire State University in the M.Ed in Curriculum and Instruction program. Prior to starting this program in January 2025 I had just completed my B.A. in Adolescent Mathematics and Special Education at Keuka College. While I have past experience subbing, I currently work as a preschool lead teacher as my full time job. However, I recently excepted a position as a middle school mathematics teacher at a local school district!

My biggest interest is understanding trauma-informed educational practices and policies. During my undergraduate degree I completed an honors project surrounding this topic and through my masters I have continued to learn more about this topic and its importance in the field of education. My interest would be to grow my learning enough so that one day I can help teachers and schools develop curriculum and instructional practices that are based in trauma-informed research and policies. I chose to pursue the M.Ed in Curriculum and Instruction because I wanted to grow my mindset and further my understanding of research based practices related to building curriculum and offering valuable instruction. Additionally, Empire State allowed me the opportunity to do this asynchronously in an online format where I could choose my own pace. These benefits fit my needs very well as it is my goal to complete my degree in December of this year while working full time.

My learning goals for this course are quite general. I feel as though media and literacies are not well represented in mathematics classrooms. I would like to use what I learn from this course to better supplement my students holistic learning in the mathematics setting and create a space where students are building a full toolbox to help them in their future endeavors. Along with this I also believe that this course will support my personal understanding of new media and new literacies since I currently feel that this is an area I am lacking in.

Attached here is a meme that one of my friends sent to me recently for May 4th. It made me chuckle so I decided it would be a good meme to share here! (Explanation: when you take the square root of a number there are 2 answers, one is positive and the other is negative. In this meme the student is saying that if x squared is 9 then x must be 3 because the square root of 9 is 3. However, there is another answer because the square root of 9 can also be negative 3 since negative 3 times negative 3 is positive 9 because a negative times a negative is a positive.)