not as bad as you think

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Home : 2002 : March : 5

not as bad as you think
By jl

Mike the first thing you should do is stop and put things into perspective. There are some positive aspects to this entire experience. It is better to "mess up" in student teaching as opposed to the real thing, so chalk your
errors up to it being part of the learning experience. Second, you probably didn't know what to expect from student teaching--you wanted more from your cooperating teacher and she probably expected something different from you and it just didn't "click" the way you both expected--chalk that up to different expectations and when you start your middle school experience sit down with your

new cooperating teacher and clearly state what you hope to get from the experience and ask him/her to clearly state what he/she expects from you. That will clear up any misconceptions between you. Third, consider that maybe this age level wasn't quite for you. You might find middle school more appealing. Fourth, and I think most importantly, accept the fact that you realize what went wrong and why AND that you have tried to rectify it with an apology. If your cooperating teacher cannot accept the apology, so be it. You are a better person for apologizing--she will come around--was this her first experience with a student teacher or was her class particularly difficult? Give her the benefit of the doubt and try to go in each day and finish out your experience by trying new ways to motivate and implementing her suggestions. That way, she has to at least comment on your evaluation that you made an effort to improve. If your student teaching evaluations are simply pass/fail markings, don't lose sleep over this--administrators realize that some student teaching experiences don't go well. In fact, we often don't look at the student teaching evaluation when hiring as much as we look at the "Whole Picture." So Mike, relax, look upon this as a learning experience (hey, in everyday teaching we have good experiences and lousy ones-so it really isn't all that abnormal) and go in with a positive attitude and a goal to make an improvement in one to three areas. Try to talk to your cooperating teacher again and let her know you realize you have "messed up" as you said and that you would like to improve in the following areas. Then ask her to make suggestions to help you there. If all else fails and you find this completely inappropriate for what you have been through, you can always consider asking your college supervisor to let you do your middle school experience and then follow-up with another experience at the grade level you are currently in. Granted, more work/extra time--but showing flexibility and a willingness to work it out are great attributes in a teacher! Good luck and keep us posted. There is a silver lining to every cloud.