In the education program, the crux of the whole thing is student teaching. In undergrad, it was more nerve racking, but when I had to do it this time, it was more annoying. I had to leave my job for seven weeks, so I could go teach somewhere else, because I could not do it in my own classroom, and my years of experience did not count. It was a long and stressful seven weeks that started in the middle of January, and it finished after the first week in March. I just finished my first week back at my job, and it is so great to be back. I missed it dearly. Here are five things I learned.
1. At this point in my teaching career, it is a lot easier to just stand up there and teach with minimal prep. The first week there, my teacher asked me if I wanted to lead the positivity project, which is basically watch a video about a positive character trait, and then discuss it as a class. So I just went up there and led it without really knowing anything going into it, and this can be said many times over. I would be given whatever worksheet for math or language arts, and then a few minutes later I would help to lead the group though it. There is just a level of comfort now to leading a lesson or part of a lesson that definitely was not there the first time I student taught. It also has become natural to improvise and assist the students in the most helpful way. It is probably the skill that I have grown the most in my years of teaching.
2. EdTPA is still the worst thing ever to be created for teachers. New York state decided that EdTPA was no longer required to become certified, so I thought I was lucky and would not have to do it, but I was wrong. Each college gets to decide which certification test they want their school to use, and of course Syracuse ended up staying with EdTPA. I literally have never heard of a single professor at Syracuse who likes EdTPA, they all say that it has some serious inequalities. Also so many of the questions are so repetitive and barely understandable. It was so hard to motivate myself to get through it. So many times, I would pull it up and stare at it and just walk away because I could not stand deciphering what it was asking. Teaching does not make me want to quit teaching, but both times I had to do EdTPA I thought about quitting teaching.
3. Having every inch of a lesson be dissected and critiqued sucks. Part of student teaching is being observed three times by an advisor, a person who had basically taught all their life, and now they go and observe and tell you how to be a good teacher. I had to send three lesson plans for math, three for language arts, and three for social studies, and it did not matter what I did or how detailed it was, they were just never good enough. Then when I would teach the lesson, and she would come and observe there was always a long list of things as well. Of course, the one lesson of all student teaching that did not go as I envisioned it in my head was one of the three that she came and saw. It ate me up for a week. If she literally would have come the day before or the day after, it would have been perfect, but that is not the ways things go. In undergrad, Dr. Morgan said no significant teaching can occur without a significant relationship, and I did not feel like I had a relationship with her at all, so everything felt so critical instead of helpful. She did end up giving me all 4s, which was the highest score, and I was shocked. I thought for sure she was going to give me 2s and 3s, but instead she was really nice at the end, so she grew on me, but at that point it did not really matter, because there were no more observations. I felt more like I was trying to play a game by her rules than teach. That is not to say that she was unhelpful, but we just did not click.
4. Classroom Management is still not my strong suit. This reminded me way more of my one year of teaching seventh grade than it did of teaching preschool, which was surprising considering they are closer to preschoolers than they are seventh graders. There were some behaviors that needed to be dealt with pretty regularly, and although I think I did a decent job of handling them, it still gets to me at times, which is where the real stress from student teaching would come from. There were some second graders that just wanted to argue about everything, and it was so confusing. Even with my gentle approach of de-escalation some of the sass I would get back would still confound me. I have improved greatly in my ability to address and deal with behaviors since teaching seventh grade, but there are definitely times when I wish I had a stronger voice.
5. The weirdest thing I have had to come to terms with my first week back to my job is that it is okay to go home and not feel super stressed. I was listening to an old South Beach Session, where Dan LeBatard was interviewing Pablo Torre about his decision to leave ESPN and join Dan. He said he wanted to work somewhere he would have fun, and my first week back, even from the first day, it felt so different than student teaching in a positive way. I was back working with the people I know and am friends with, and I was having fun. It is still not an easy job, but it is much more enjoyable than student teaching, but for whatever reason, I would go home, and it felt weird. I think that I had gotten into the mode of needing to feel stressed to feel like I had accomplished something at work, because that is just the way it was for those seven weeks. So I felt like I was not doing enough, but I just have to get back into the mindset of just because it is not stressful does not mean it is not successful.
I think one of the biggest problems with all of this is that I was not able to run while student teaching, and that is my biggest way of destressing. So would I have had a more enjoyable time if this was the case? Probably, but going into it, I was already pretty down on the idea of leaving my job for seven weeks, and there is a quote from Lincoln that says most people are about as happy as they choose to be, and at that point, I think I had already chosen to be unhappy. I take a big share of blame for that. I still have to do another round of student teaching, but this time, I will get to do it in my school, just not my room, because semantics.
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