confidence – discovery

Life of a student teacher

Work for a cause, not for applause. Live life to express, not to impress. Don’t strive to make your presence noticed, just make your absence felt.

Being a teacher is hard work. Student teaching follows an extremely steep learning curve, and it is one that requires me to be completely humble. I enjoy the new routine, waking up early and looking forward to an early bedtime. I love being with my students at school, and I feel comfortable and completely at ease in the school environment. However, it is incredibly trying just to be responsible for many, many things all at once.

I appreciate the great feedback I am getting on my teaching, from all perspectives (my mentor, my own reflections, my student’s reactions, my colleagues’ discussions). It is just scary to be so transparent and have to make myself vulnerable to critique in order to grow the most, best.

While I am working on incorporating “Big Ideas” into my lessons, I must also focus on the big idea for me as a teacher. I want the students to love learning. I want to impart strategies that they can use to work together, as well as independently. I want to make learning meaningful for the students by facilitating discussion and exploration of real life events and objects.

Tomorrow is another day.

“Is it that you can’t, or that you don’t want to?”

I am reading LouAnne Johnson’s “Teaching Outside the Box”. In one chapter she refers to the question that her mentor once asked his student: “Is it that you can’t, or that you want to?” He challenged his student to replace all his “can’ts” with “don’t want to”. The statement, “I can’t solve this problem” becomes “I don’t want to solve this problem”, which is usually false for most students. They do want to. They just don’t have the confidence or assertiveness to attack the problem and solve it. It is must easier to go with “I can’t”.

Today my student told me he “can’t be a leader”, and that his homeroom teacher always tells him so. I asked him, do you really think you can’t, or do you simply not want to?

No one wants to fail at anything. I know he wants to be a leader, to be trusted with responsibility. He just always assumed he “couldn’t”. So, he took on an apathetic attitude towards everything he tries. He lets things he tries disappoint him because he expects to disappoint. He shows indifference to protect himself from “failing”, which he assumes he will do if he tries. I told him that he must not take what his homeroom teacher assumes, to be his own assumption.

Today he realized he could (do anything), as long as he acknowledged that he wanted to.