Teaching for the Students

Thursday and Friday last week, I got the opportunity to teach everything in both classes of my internship, all morning long. I quickly found out some minor things teachers struggle with -- almost counting students absent because they were not sitting in their correct seats, trying to find and organize graded papers to hand back, and thoroughly explaining each assignment. I also forgot about certain "small" details, such as reading the morning announcements. Our school limits morning announcements, which is good because they don't cut in to class time, but sometimes teachers can forget to read them because they want to get started with their lessons!

The students had two major activities to complete. First, they had to complete a test on tone...even though they could use their binders, I had a lot of students asking questions about different parts of the assignments. I had a stack of papers to grade and could barely get through them! Also, time was an issue...they had 35 minutes to complete the test, but even though they worked diligently, they struggled to complete it in time. I wanted to give them more time to finish, because I felt bad for them, but they needed time to complete the second assignment, a book assessment. I gave them about five extra minutes but then had to force myself to pick up some incomplete tests.

Then, it was time for the book assessment. I explained every page, but the questions kept coming. Some students thought they only had to do the first page. Nearly every student missed the "use diction" part of the directions for the first page, and thought they only had to list character names and tone words. Once again, I spent the majority of the class period answering questions and hardly got any papers graded. I was beginning to feel a little frazzled and wondering if my teaching skills were going to be up to par.

Then, I realized something. All those times the students came to me individually asking questions were learning experiences for me. I got to know a little more about these students' strengths and weaknesses, and found myself doing a better job explaining one-on-one. I learned part of why teachers are constantly busy and why they value their prep periods, but I also learned one of the most rewarding parts of being a teacher -- actually getting to know your students and seeing their progress. Sometimes, we do this and find that we have to backtrack and review concepts our students should have learned before. Sometimes, this whole process stresses us out. But ultimately, if we can reach out to each student individually and make them feel like they can ask for our help, we are doing our jobs right!