Unlike most teachers, I have to work in the summer. It is not a choice of if I want to teach summer school or not, it is just the way it is. This is mainly due to working in a school that largely specializes in special needs. Each year, there is a meeting with the school district about each individual student that has an IEP, so in the case of my class this year, I had nine meetings with various districts in the Syracuse area. During these annual review meetings, we discuss the student’s IEP and decide if the student is going to receive summer services. Summer services come in the form of six weeks of school in the summer. In our case, the hours stay the same, the teachers stay the same, and the therapists (speech, occupational, and physical) stay the same. The goal is for the students to maintain their skills over summer, so when school starts back in the fall, they are not behind. I have yet to be in a meeting where a student with an IEP did not receive summer session. So this year, instead of getting to finish off the school year with my kids, I had to go to another classroom, thankfully staying in my school this time, and teach there. Here is what I learned.
1. There are always a bunch of small changes that can be made to the classroom in the form of rules and routines, but a lot of this minutia comes down to the teacher. This can come in the form of how students line up, how they walk down the hall, what they do in the gym, etc. The problem is that it can be so easy to get stuck in the routine of how you do things that you do not realize there needs to be a change, so going into another class at the same level of the one you work in can be very insightful. There were many small guard rails in the classroom I entered that I did not think about, like having the students line up at the bottom of the gym mat not at the top, and this limits the chance of students “accidently” jumping on top of each other. Or when doing circle, have the students sit in a tighter circle, so that they have less room to move around and get up and find another spot. With a more limited area, they are more likely to stay where they are.
2. One thing that bothered me way more than I expected it to, was not getting all fours from my supervisor on the final review. In my stint of student teaching in the Spring, my supervisor was way too hard on me, but despite her copious amount of overbearing feedback and massive amount of stress she gave me, she ended up giving me all fours, which included changing a couple of my scores in the moment when my cooperating teacher reported on different things in the classroom that I did. My supervisor this time was so much easier going. I did not get an immediate stress reaction when I got communication from her, and she gave me reasonably sized pieces of feedback after a lesson, but she gave me TWO threes, and on the sheet, she only gave me one thing to improve on, the second three did not even have a “work on ____” comment. Not being stressed out was nice, and not having to write a whole lesson plan sequence was nice, but you know what else is nice getting all fours! I keep telling people at least I was not stressed out this time, and it really does not matter, because it is a pass-fail course, but it still bothers me. It’s weird.
3. The other aspect of student teaching in my school, but not in my classroom, that bothered me was not being with my kids. It is so weird to walk around the building I normally work in, but then to go into a different classroom and be around different kids. There is nothing wrong with being around different kids, but they are not my kids, and although I know I was leaving my kids in good hands, with my TAs that had been working with the kids all year long, and a new team member that I was traded for, I can’t help but feel like by not being there I was letting them down. It is much easier to suppress this feeling when teaching at another school when I did not have to make daily eye contact with the kids that I had spent a whole school year creating a relationship with. Having those small interactions although joyful were also sad, because some of the kids would be like why are you not in here with us? Then by the end of the summer after six weeks, when I went back to my class for the last couple of days, it felt weird and wrong to leave the kids that I had spent all summer with. That is one of the hardest parts of teaching is having the kids leave after a year, but it is also the best part as well, seeing how far the kids grow in one year before moving on to bloom somewhere else.
4. Also going back to undergrad each time that I have student taught, I have had an “injury” that has seriously affected my running. In undergrad, when I student taught that was when my anemia first struck, and it was vicious. It was so hard to breathe, and this is important to running but also teaching. In the spring, I had my walking boot on for four weeks when I student taught in second grade, and this summer I fell and banged my knee and was pretty incapacitated for three weeks. There was a large amount of sitting with my legs out straight, but in a preschool classroom, that takes up a ton of room, so my legs were basically an obstacle to the kids moving throughout the room or sitting on the carpet. It also did not help that before the injury, I had earned the title as all-time tagger for freeze tag, which was a great running warm up, but once I was hurt, I could not run at all for the first week, and it was a struggle the second week. Also do not take the speed of three- to five-year-olds lightly, some of them can really fly. Like I would have to turn the jets on a little bit to catch them at times, but I undoubtedly had the tactical advantage. Due to the playground being fenced in, it was easy to chase most of them into a corner, so speed was not needed all the time, so even when hobbled I could still play well. Also correlation does not mean causation, but in this case, I think it is pretty clear that all my running related injuries can be blamed on student teaching, and now that I am done with student teaching, I will never get hurt again…
5. This last aspect was not as much learned, but a continual development. I suck at delegating tasks in the classroom. I much rather try to do everything myself than to ask someone to do it. It does not matter if it is a small thing or a big thing. The teacher I was with made it look so simple, but for some reason I mentally make it so hard. I will figure it out though.
At the end of the day, I did enjoy student teaching pre-k much more than I did teaching second grade, thus cementing what I already knew that I love working where I am. It is a great place, and I am very happy to be back in my classroom next year. It is also not lost on me the amount that we can learn from observing another teacher in the act. It is something that disappears once we leave college, but there really should be a couple of days during the year, where we get the chance to observe another teacher and see how they do things. It would be better for everyone. Just a little inconvenient. Also, each year, I see another teacher “friend” (person I follow on Instagram or am friends with on Facebook) drop from the profession. It is by no means an easy job or a financially rewarding one, but it is one I love. I am ready for preschool round five in one week! (It is weird that all my Georgia teacher friends started back before I even got to start my summer break after summer school ended.)
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