I'm a teacher. I never saw this coming.
This was written by Jim Watson who is a teacher in British Columbia. Watson blogs here. This post was originally found here.
by Jim Watson
Before I started teaching in my own classroom in the fall of 1987, I would sneak into the quiet, empty school daily, starting in early August just to get a feel for the place: to set up my bulletin boards and arrange desks; to familiarize myself with some of the resources and to develop unit plans and a year overview. Actually, the planning had begun in June, but by August, I was revising and fine tuning.
I was terrified. Making it work was going to be very difficult, as I had learned through many a late night during my practicum.
Ah yes, the practicum – the rite of initiation that made or broke you as a starting teacher. It was in the practicum that we learned the harsh reality that no matter how much work we did as a teachers, we could always do more – that no matter how long we worked, the work would never ever be finished.
Haunting every new teacher is an awareness that we can never achieve the ideal of teaching. We can never be on top of every child’s every individual learning need in every subject all the time. The world of the classroom teacher is not such a world. That world is reserved for the extremely wealthy: princes and the like, who have private tutors in each subject area. Education in the real world would never be ideal.
And as we got to know our students, we were haunted by other facts: that some of our students suffered abuse; that some suffered from mental illness or neglect; that some came to school simply unready to learn for myriad reasons, poverty being the one unifying factor for most cases.
So we learned to work as much as we could, keeping in mind that we had to stop, to eat and to sleep, and that once in a while our lovers or friends might want to have us around, or we’d have to attend a staff meeting. The teaching practicum was about imbalance. It for the love of learning: I'm a teacher. I never saw this coming.:
Before I started teaching in my own classroom in the fall of 1987, I would sneak into the quiet, empty school daily, starting in early August just to get a feel for the place: to set up my bulletin boards and arrange desks; to familiarize myself with some of the resources and to develop unit plans and a year overview. Actually, the planning had begun in June, but by August, I was revising and fine tuning.
I was terrified. Making it work was going to be very difficult, as I had learned through many a late night during my practicum.
Ah yes, the practicum – the rite of initiation that made or broke you as a starting teacher. It was in the practicum that we learned the harsh reality that no matter how much work we did as a teachers, we could always do more – that no matter how long we worked, the work would never ever be finished.
Haunting every new teacher is an awareness that we can never achieve the ideal of teaching. We can never be on top of every child’s every individual learning need in every subject all the time. The world of the classroom teacher is not such a world. That world is reserved for the extremely wealthy: princes and the like, who have private tutors in each subject area. Education in the real world would never be ideal.
And as we got to know our students, we were haunted by other facts: that some of our students suffered abuse; that some suffered from mental illness or neglect; that some came to school simply unready to learn for myriad reasons, poverty being the one unifying factor for most cases.
So we learned to work as much as we could, keeping in mind that we had to stop, to eat and to sleep, and that once in a while our lovers or friends might want to have us around, or we’d have to attend a staff meeting. The teaching practicum was about imbalance. It for the love of learning: I'm a teacher. I never saw this coming.: