And just like that – with the ring of the bell, my third quarter of student teaching, my first actual quarter of directly taking over the responsibilities of an educator, is over. Though it started off rather rocky, I have learned quite a great amount from both interacting with my students and the massive amounts of lesson planning and grading I have had to do (in addition to all the University and state requirements to get my credential).
A few take-aways, and things I need to dramatically improve on for next quarter:
1. Be more strict. Though a few students (the troublemakers) have recommended I be “chill”, most of the students anonymously surveyed have asked me to be more rigid in discipline. I will have to do so in order to effectively manage my classroom.
2. Use my own lesson plans. It’s fairly obvious when I extract my master teacher’s lesson plan or get lesson plans from the Internet. Instead, making my own makes things more creative and allows me to become more enthusiastic about the content area I am teaching. It does have the drawback though of taking a massive amount of time. A good lesson plan takes me about 3 hours to complete. If I wanted a perfect week I’d have to plan lessons for 30 hours for U.S. and World history combined.
3. Learn to de-stress. I’ve never had to cope with this large amount of stress before. In high school I had all the free time in the world to do homework. In college I majored in Communications and History, not exactly the most rigorous majors you can think of. In using time management I have maximized all the hours of my day with socializing, working, and of course sleeping.
In the end, the road to becoming an effective teacher takes much more work than one would imagine. I hope I can go from “survival mode” to enriching mode where I can positively build relationships with students to get them to learn. I do see some hope though for many of my students have already told me “I’m their favorite teacher”. One student who has been struggling all semester got an A on his test today and even thanked me for helping him through everything – projects and schoolwork likewise. It’s moments like that that continue to convince me I made the right decision to go into education. 10,000 more hours and I’ll have mastered a small portion of it. I get my credential in May, but I’ll be student teaching at Santiago all the way into the end of the school year. Fingers crossed before the hard stuff is almost over – my last TPA is due the Tuesday after my Spring Break, and my last formal observation is next Tuesday. The end is almost here!
