Student teaching will be
scary.
You will wake up late,
unprepared,
with only a vague idea of what you are doing for the day.
You will forget your
lunch
that you painstakingly
made the night before.
You will neglect your
boyfriend, friends, family –
You won’t remember the
last time
you had a night to
yourself.
You will be observed by
two different veteran teachers
who might tell you that
you are a horrible teacher,
you should really just
quit now.
Your CT will leave you
all alone.
With freshmen.
When you haven’t
learned all their names.
A student will be
disrespectful, assuming incorrectly that
you have no authority.
You will correct her
assumption by speaking firmly and
you will agonize over
whether or not she hates your guts.
The KPTP deadline is
looming in the distance.
You will have barely
finished Task 1.
This is the least of
your problems
because you will be
asked things that you don’t know, and
you struggle to say, “I
don’t have a clue”
even though this is the
complete truth.
You will have units to
plan, assessments to create,
and class to attend
every Wednesday night.
No matter how amazingly
engaging your lesson is,
you will have two
freshmen who fall asleep and refuse participate.
Every time.
You will take every
sleepy, unengaged, disrespectful student personally
even when your CT tells
you “Don’t!”
You will be terrified of
failure.
Lessons will fail, activities
will fall flat, some students will fail your class.
You will fail
but you will improve the
lesson, or activity so it will not fail the next time.
You will remember that
this is a learning experience
and that it is all right
to fail and make mistakes.
Student teaching will
be scary
but you’ll live.
