...so little time...

One of the things that I love about going to the seminar class every Monday night is that I get to spend a little time with my colleagues. Student teachers are in a unique--and sometimes very tenuous--position in schools. We have to take charge but still act as a guest in another teacher's classroom; we need to experiment and find our own style of teaching, while often being supervised by cynical and unimaginative teachers; we deal with supervisors who manage to make a month's worth of observations and comments in 40 minutes... And one of the things that I hate about this class is that the little time we spend together is far too little to really know each other and communicate in the ways that make people open up to each other. We share our thoughts, but rarely do we get to the point where real emotions come out. Some of us have a lot to be frustrated about, so some nights our conversations are much more frustrating than they are cathartic. I know that there are a lot of talented educators in my class, and I suspect that some of their talent comes from the way they are able to negotiate their emotions and make their student teaching a more rewarding experience. As someone that was raised in a family of glass-half-empty people, I wish I had more opportunity to tap into that. Most weeks after class I walk with Jayme out her car (our campus is situated in the middle of some questionable neighborhoods, this is one of those if I don't do it, who will? sort of things), and am rewarded with 5 minutes of good conversation on the level that is most rewarding to me. As important as the topics we discuss in the seminar are, sometimes I feel like it would be so much more rewarding to sit down at a coffee shop with four or five other student teachers and our supervisor, sit in some of those big, goofy, mismatched chairs and couches, and just talk for a little while and relax. Lord knows I need to relax more these days...

Another frustrating thing about these classes is that I always leave with so much more to say (or write) than I have time or energy to devote to the process. Tonight I'm ahead, so we'll see how much I can really cover.

It's late now, the dogs have been taken care of, dinner made and cleaned up after, laundry done, and my writing electrons don't have the positive spin energy they had when I walked home from class tonight. My glass-is-half-empty reflex is taking over and causing me to focus on something that one of my colleagues said about his teaching. He said that he was happiest as a teacher when he reached the kids that were struggling the most. And this bothered me.

I was always one of those kids that struggled in English. So it doesn't bother me because he said it, it bothers me because this was one of the things that motivated me to become a teacher, but I just don't find myself feeling that way. I feel like I'm barely keeping up to serve the kids that are doing well, and I know with total certainty that I've already made two struggling kids at my new school feel alienated. It's hard enough to be a teacher and talk with teens sometimes without making them shut down, but now I've made them close themselves off and I don't know what I can do to get them back. My cooperating teacher has already written them off and hasn't had any constructive advice besides not to let it worry me too much.

It doesn't help that the curriculum is boring, the teacher is boring, and she has trained her classes to be boring students. Critical analysis is out right now. They can find facts in a book, but they cannot tell me what they think at any level deeper than "this book sucks." I'm not sure how to get them off of this track and onto one that's more fulfilling for all of us, and my mentor is short on advice. At this point I feel more like I should just do what it takes to get through student teaching than to work on changing the atmosphere in my classes.

This is not the way I wanted to feel about my performance midway through student teaching.