After being too busy to blog about anything for the last eight months - student teaching, graduation, job hunting, and working two jobs will do that to you - I think I'm going to come back and try to update this a little more often now. If nothing else, this will at least be a place to put down my thoughts and concerns, and make them look neat and organized, unlike the jumbled mess in my head. Seriously, for an organ that is supposed to be the most advanced system on the planet, the standard organization and reliability of basic cognitive function makes a frat house look like a five-star hotel. So, I guess we'll start from where we left off:
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Frustrated, Insecure, Neurotic, Emotional
Sure, I'm Feeling fine! |
Student teaching is perhaps one of the most interesting experiences I've ever had in my life. It is easily described as a "rollercoaster ride of emotion," but is closer to being in the funnel of a tornado that is made out of stress, work, and emotions. When the high levels of stress and work meet the unstable pressure of the emotional gamut that an educator-in-training is asked to experience, the result is nothing short of that horribly animated super-tornado from
Twister. However, let's add the tears of frustration, the sleepless nights, the horrible feeling that you are constantly failing the children in the classroom, the anxiety of being watched by unfamiliar administration, and the confusion that comes from the ambiguous goals of the standards set by the state, and you wind up with what I like to call an "Emotional Apocalypse." This is a situation in which your emotions run from bliss to loathing to depression to apathy all inside of an hour, every hour, every day, until you are done. If you couple this with working - as this foolish writer did - you might as well assume that your frontal lobe has gone supernova and has begun to eat your brain... or that one of your classmates has turned into a zombie and is trying to eat what is left of your mind.
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| Brraaaaiiiinnnsss...Must educate BRRRRAAAAIIIINNNNSSS! |
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| Here goes nothing... |
Now in my case, I just entered as state of panic for seven hours a day, five days a week, for four months. Truly, I didn't start to calm down until the last week of the research paper, but then other anxieties began to kick in. Starting the student-teaching process is really no different than the standard observations that most students do prior to the student teaching semester. However, I was blessed with taking over a class - a remedial Read 180 II course - from the second day that I was in my student teaching semester. For a full month I was tasked to formulate thirty-minute lessons either based around a decided workbook, or stray from that and challenge myself further by creating my own lessons. While this was at least ten times the work, the product that the students produced was no less than a hundred times better than what they would produce otherwise. Additionally, this gave me the opportunity to do whole-class assignments - like Writing Wednesdays - and allowed the students to produce the topics of which they would write. When that month expired, students were writing in ways they had initially told me they never would or couldn't. Further, the gap in respect had begun to close between the instructors and the students. While this might seem insignificant to most, this might have actually been the best thing to happen since I arrived. The end of the first month came and so did a change of semesters.
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| That was your first mistake... |
Once the semesters changed, the classrooms were ceded to me completely, and I was left to my own devices. The process of developing a lesson plan for an entire day, to this point, had been an extremely challenging process that would take several hours to complete. Now I was tasked with creating at least five of them a week, by a certain day. I spent the first week or two completely convinced all the students hated me, I was failing them as an educator, they were not learning anything, and that all of my methodology was completely failing. This was largely in part due to the first week being a short "crash course" of basic grammar that the results of should horrify any potential students out there and some parents as well. It wasn't until the third week that I got into a groove for writing lesson plans in a cohesive form, and in the next few weeks, began to experiment with creating a daily focus that was usually hinted at in the anticipatory set. Some of the students, I think, finally caught onto this just in time for the HSPA week. For those of you that don't know what the New Jersey HSPA is, consider yourself lucky. We'll just say it's standardized testing that requires the week of preparation that I did with the students. It was not a fun week for the students or for the instructor. However, the HSPA came and went, and ultimately... 100% of them passed. Unheard of, but those kids worked hard for it. After the HSPA, we had some fun with acting in the classroom and then came the dreaded research paper. Given the experiences I had trying to teach 11th graders to do a research paper for the first time, it makes more sense pedagogically to start research papers much earlier - say middle school - to at least establish what is required in a research paper, create a basic understanding for formatting, and to get some practice in the research process. That said, almost everyone handed in their research paper, and a few of them were stellar, despite the time constraints.
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| The future generation... |
When it was finally over, it seemed a bit surreal. I had actually managed to teach students for three months with little to no issue in the classroom, getting work in, and getting the students to perform. I received the paperwork I needed, constructed my portfolio, met with my supervisor and my cooperating instructor one last time, and it was time to leave the school for good. There had been talk of a position or two opening up in the school I student taught at when I first came in, but these dreams were ultimately crushed by the final meeting I attended in which the budget was deterred for things other than more faculty. Now, without a prospect of a teaching position, a promise of employment, a job that was forty-five miles from home - in one direction - and the realization that I was on the road to having to financially support myself, I began to panic. Graduation came and flew by and reminded me why I didn't sit through the first one in December. Instead, it solidified the ideas that not only were all of the students aware that we were not getting jobs in the first place, we were expected to become functional adults in society immediately after graduation. A hopelessly removed lady spoke that day, as our guest speaker, of a story that no one could relate to: her life story. Her life story was not one that was filled with struggles, hard work, and perseverance in the face of adversity. Instead, her story was a story of one success after another, where she never failed and always won. A lot of us looked around at each other as she told this story and then assured us that the most important part of this process was that we had gotten out degrees. To quote the back of many of the graduating students' caps: Now what?
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| Well... We can dream... |
