I am almost through my first week with my student teacher. So far so good... I think!
I am the type of person who craves control and the peace that it gives me.
When I found out on Friday night that I was getting a student teacher for the first time on Monday….that sent my stress level into overdrive! I spent Saturday to Tuesday night waking up in the middle of the night with crazy heart palpitations and thinking in my head, "This is the end. I'm having a heart attack at 30 years old." The thudding would eventually subside and I would be able to drift back into a restless sleep, but that didn't help my state of mind when going into work.
When I walked into school on Monday I had so many things to accomplish and a few meetings that I was very frenzied when I first met her. This is out of character for me because I am rarely frenzied (Sarcastic, bitter, and distraught, but frenzied?….NO). I had to race around my room and the school that I was barely about to mutter 3 sentences to her before classes started.
My hurricane state couple with the fact that the kids were off kilter that day created a perfect storm that probably gave the poor girl heart palpitations of her own that night. However, she showed up the next day so that is a plus!
We have not had a lot of time to talk one on one yet, but she has been really willing to jump in and help so far!
Yesterday she helped conference with students on the essays that they are writing. I saw a large shift in the way students addressed her from the day before to after she helped them with their essays also, which makes me cautiously optimistic in their upcoming behavior towards her.
Today, without being asked, she jumped right in and helped transfer those essays from the NEOs we were typing on to the library computers, helped to make copies, and helped with the grading (I even looked over a few of the grades she was giving for the essays and she was pretty much spot on).
I don't know how she will stack up on her content knowledge, but we will cross that bridge when we get to it!
We decided that next week I will teach a block, then she will teach a block. We will discuss over lunch how it went and then we will alternate teaching the remaining two blocks again.
The following week she will start teaching on her own fairly exclusively (with me still in the classroom).
I'm nervous about this whole process. Worried that I'm not doing it properly, worried that I am not acting like a role model, and worried that I will scar her for life!
However, I will say that there are a lot of new student teachers in the building and so far I keep telling myself, "Man, I'm glad I got this one!"
I just hope that she feels the same way and is not thinking to herself, "Man, I wish I hadn't gotten this teacher!"
The way that I interact with my kids is different and unique, but I hope that she can learn something from my lessons, the way I structure my class, and maybe a little bit of my management style.
I had a student teacher and I enjoyed the experience. It was fun to collaborate and to model a basic lesson for her. I tried to infuse her learning with little tricks I had learned from my experiences, such as how to pace the lesson, how to anticipate the worst- case scenario ( and be prepared for it!), and how to develop relationships with the students. In my district, it is difficult to get a student teacher so I had only one after all these years.
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