It’s been exactly one week and 1 day since my first moments as a student teacher, and already the last bell of the day feels like a small conquest. Even after an unplanned snow day and a shorter resulting week, the semester feels like it’s dragging. Each morning, I’m still terrified on the drive to school, counting down the minutes until I have to direct a classroom of melodramatic, lazy senior students on the modalities and formalities of public speaking. Each time they walk into the room, I have an overwhelming realization that I would like nothing more than to borrow 23 car seats and strap them in to combat their childish behaviors and temper-tantrums, but we’re taking each day as it comes, and I’ve allowed them to continue sitting in their bid kid desks.
While I currently teach only two sections of senior speech, I’ve learned more from my kids in 6 days than I could have ever imagined. And while I love them and their abilities to keep every second of my life full of sporadic change and excitement, their impact on my mood is an aspect of teaching that I have yet to accept.
As a student at Illinois State University, I had the opportunity to enter into the student teachings-sphere early through Professional Development and prologue my experiences in the classroom from the traditional one semester to an entire year.
Isn’t it funny that they don’t realized how much they impact my experience? I wonder if they’d make it easier or more difficult. I wonder if they’d cut me a break, or push me harder than they already are.
Despite my battles and wavering half-victories, standing in front of the room, I’ve found, suddenly feels natural, and my kids don’t scare me nearly as much as they used to once I’m standing at the front of the room.
My problem, I’m sure, is that on the first day, I walked in thinking I was going to change their lives—at least, I walked in hoping they were going to listen to me enough to let me change their lives. I expected resistance, but I can’t express just how much they fought me and continue to fight me from my very first second in front of the room, and just how terrified I was that I had somehow set myself up as deserving of this behavior.
Upon reflecting on my first few days and the decisions I made, I remember one week before beginning my journey as a student teacher, when I created a list of every teacher-ism that I refused to exhibit. At the very top of my list was the “I stand here silently, staring at you until you stop talking” expression that I had all-too-often witnessed in class. The sheer terror, anguish, and tumultuous anger—all resulting from guilt and annoyance—spread across my peers’ faces was a look I refused to incite.
My very first day, I succumbed to the pressure and “waited until he stopped talking by staring at him silently.”
I began my journey as a sell-out, having lost, within the first week, everything I’d advocated for since the beginning of my pre-service journey. I created rubrics, assigned points, employed embarrassing behavior management techniques, and assigned homework on the weekends. I made assignments that were purely academic, focused entirely on educating the mind and ignorant of the needs of fostering an empathetic heart, and I let my anger and resentment influence my interactions with my class. I’d done everything I’d promised to never do as a teacher within the first 7 days of teaching.
I’d officially sold out for simplicity, caved in order to get by without overexertion. While I went to sleep thinking about my subject, my students, their futures and their current needs, and woke up with the same thoughts trailing through my conscious, no doubt continuing from a night of student-centric dreams, I still felt as though I wasn’t giving enough, wasn’t trying enough to get them interested and excited about the possibilities of having me as a teacher.
If only I could tell them how sorry I was, how much I resented the teacher I had become; I wanted nothing more than to quit and walk away, with at least a semblance of the teacher I had wanted to become as a distant memory, before she fizzled away entirely.
Looking in the mirror, I resented myself and my decisions, impulsive choices made in front of the room and the favoritism I had already begun to employ. Thinking of my students meant complaining about their behaviors, their resentment of me and my goals and aspirations, and their hatred of ideas that I had become so proud of. Pieces of me folded into each lesson, sections of my brain, heart and passions nestled into the crevices of each handout, each activity, each lesson were flattened by their protesting, stomping feet and my ego burned red from their (just barely-metaphorically) waving, indignant fists.
And now, as I sit on my bed in my cold and tiny apartment, I wonder what the rest of the journey could possibly bring. More resentment, or exciting successes (or, more likely, a few of both)? While I walked in with a wish and a goal, I'm leaving each day with less enthusiasm and passion, and I hope to spring back from where I'm headed.
I think about my students constantly, in such a way that I hope betters my abilities to design lessons and activities that will interest them and preserve their engagement. My fingers are crossed that this dismal beginning is just a part of this experience that I'll look back on after they've hugged me goodbye on our last day together.