as a new teacher...

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Home : 2004 : September : 17

as a new teacher...
By Sandra

Ann,
As a first year teacher I must say... student teaching sugar coated the realities of day to day teaching. It is easy when you're in there with your cooperating teacher to be able to sit and pull children to work
with them individually and talk to them when they've misbehaved because there's that second person there to kind of monitor and cover the classroom. Now that I have a class of active six year olds and I'm all alone trying to get them to focus all by myself and learn routines and learn in time for the benchmark tests it is just impossible to sit with each individual child to work with them.

Especially the earlier years when they just can't work independently for very long. Attention spans are short and they are barely reading. Wait until you are in a classroom of your own. It is impossible to do everything you want to do with the children. There are too many other things in this job that take up time. While I've only been teaching for two weeks now, I've been working 12 hours a day trying to stay on top of the piles of paperwork and plans I have to do. Now try to add in children who have special needs. Thank goodness children are resourceful. I think that sometimes we don't give them enough credit. I've seen classes before that understood that "Alex" was a little different and that they needed to help him. My children have only been at school 9 days and they have already picked up on who needs a little extra help. Are they mean about it? not at all. They just quietly remind "Susan" to sit quietly on the rug. They make sure they tell her when it's time to line up to go in from recess and they make sure she has a buddy to help her outside during fire drills and other activities. I've digressed from the original reason for my post. Basically I wanted to say that I think students understand that life isn't fair. I think that we'd all like to have an idealistic classroom where every child had their needs met in the best way possible. But that's not reality. Wait until your first year and you will see that. It took me two days into the week to realize I couldn't be super teacher. I couldn't do it all and if I tried I actually would wind up making things worse for the students in my class. Oh and everyone else was right. This is a vent board. I use it often. It does not mean that I hate teaching... and I am sure the same holds true for most if not all the teachers who post here. They do because they care. I joined the profession because I love working with children. Unfortunitely with that comes the administrators (some of which are wonderful) the parents, (some of which are not bad) and tons of other little things that keep us from focusing all our attention on the kids. That is why this board is here. I think that once you get your own classroom you will be able to understand that it's impossible to do it all and do it all perfectly.