Assignment 1

Hi everyone! My name is Molly, I'm 21 and a senior at Montclair. I'm majoring in Family and Child Studies with a concentration in K-5 and I'm also working on a history minor. I became interested in teaching because in my sophomore year of high school I started teaching Ballet, Tap and group figure skating lessons; I still teach figure skating as well as work at a daycare. I absolutely love spending time with children and find it so rewarding to see the look of accomplishment on their faces when they learn something new. My overall goal is to teach, I would particularly love to teach kindergarden-3rd grade or 6th-8th grade Social Studies.
Family has always been important to me, half of my family lives in New Jersey while the other half lives in Pennsylvania. Even though we're kind of spread out we always get together whenever possible and its always entertaining to say the least. In my immediate family I have my Mom, Dad, my older sister Emily and our two dogs Duncan and Denali (I definitely consider pets part of the family definition!) Although my sister is five years older than me, she has definitely become one of my closest friends. Despite the age difference we're pretty much the same person, we both love being outdoors, enjoy most of the same sports, and have the exact same taste in music, movies and books. My parents have been married for 29 years, my Mom is an elementary school music teacher and my father is a program manager at ARK. Growing up, both my parents took an active role in my love of sports; my Dad was my soccer coach for 10 years and my Mom took me to all my figure skating lessons up until I was old enough to drive myself.
Probably my favorite activity would have to be figure skating, not only did it inspire me to become a teacher but I have invested a large portion of my life training and practice for competitions and other events. Also since my Mom was the main person that drove me to lessons and competitions we developed a close bond. I believe that without my love of figure skating we wouldn't be as close as we are today.
One topic that interested me on the syllabus was marriage. Its seems like the topic of marriage is always being debated; when is someone too young/old to get married, who should be "allowed" to get married,  is marriage as important as it was and so on. I will be interested in seeing if the views on marriage have greatly changed over the years or remained relatively the same. I also am interested in learning about Race, Ethnicity and Families. Each race and ethnicity has unique characteristics that probably influence family life tremendously and I look forward to learning about these differences.
This is not only the first time I have used wiki but it is also the first time I have taken an online course so I'm definitely a little nervous. However everything seems simple to use so far and the directions are fairly clear. Furthermore the video on how to use wikis helped me realize that this format isn't as complicated as I thought it would be.