Student Teaching Will be Scary

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.