The Friday Five: End of a (Student Teaching) Era
Today was the last day of student teaching at the elementary school. At anywhere. Twelve weeks are done!
At the end of the day today, I didn't get emotional the way I did when I left the high school and Dr. Red. Maybe it was a different kind of parting, because I felt more attached to the high school than to the elementary school. Or maybe it's because I have a different relationship with Mrs. K. than I do with Dr. Red. Or I'm just too wiped out and it hasn't hit me yet. Or I've finally taken to heart the supposed library saying that "There's no crying in baseball and library." I dunno. Anyhow, I learned a lot from both places--here are five interesting lessons from student teaching:
1. Planning to use a particular technology (e.g. set up blogs, use a new set of microphone headsets, show a website with the document projector) with an entire class is an invitation to an EPIC FAIL. It's one of those corollaries to Murphy's Law they don't warn you about in any of your education courses.
2. If you're being observed by your professor, odds are excellent that a kindergartener will raise his/her hand and launch into a story involving family pets wearing his/her underwear. (That oughta bring me some hits from search engines.)
3. The best line of defense against #2 is a good offense--ask if the comment "has to do with what we're reading." If not (and usually that is the case), steamroll the student and tell him/her we're sticking to the story. Your sanity, not to mention your control of the class, depends on it.
4. The library houses the lunchroom for all the cool teachers. The other key to your sanity (the first key being steamrolling students harboring pet-underwear comments) is having time each day to blow off steam and laugh with cool people.
5. There really still are students around who really like the library, and some who come to like the library because they encounter good librarians there--Dr. Red, Mrs. K., and hopefully someday soon, me.
Have a good weekend, everyone. I'm off to slug more of Amy G's cure to encourage my voice to continue recovering.
At the end of the day today, I didn't get emotional the way I did when I left the high school and Dr. Red. Maybe it was a different kind of parting, because I felt more attached to the high school than to the elementary school. Or maybe it's because I have a different relationship with Mrs. K. than I do with Dr. Red. Or I'm just too wiped out and it hasn't hit me yet. Or I've finally taken to heart the supposed library saying that "There's no crying in baseball and library." I dunno. Anyhow, I learned a lot from both places--here are five interesting lessons from student teaching:
1. Planning to use a particular technology (e.g. set up blogs, use a new set of microphone headsets, show a website with the document projector) with an entire class is an invitation to an EPIC FAIL. It's one of those corollaries to Murphy's Law they don't warn you about in any of your education courses.
2. If you're being observed by your professor, odds are excellent that a kindergartener will raise his/her hand and launch into a story involving family pets wearing his/her underwear. (That oughta bring me some hits from search engines.)
3. The best line of defense against #2 is a good offense--ask if the comment "has to do with what we're reading." If not (and usually that is the case), steamroll the student and tell him/her we're sticking to the story. Your sanity, not to mention your control of the class, depends on it.
4. The library houses the lunchroom for all the cool teachers. The other key to your sanity (the first key being steamrolling students harboring pet-underwear comments) is having time each day to blow off steam and laugh with cool people.
5. There really still are students around who really like the library, and some who come to like the library because they encounter good librarians there--Dr. Red, Mrs. K., and hopefully someday soon, me.
Have a good weekend, everyone. I'm off to slug more of Amy G's cure to encourage my voice to continue recovering.
Comments
Heh. Is that a Kate P. original or maybe a classic from Melvil Dewey? I hope you're feeling better.
'Fly--thanks. Before Mass, I told the celebrant I was recovering from laryngitis. . . and at the beginning of Mass, he told the people they had to sing louder to help me out. Especially the people in the back. Soooo embarrassing.