I was sitting in the University Center in G'ville waiting for my next class to start when I remembered I had this blog and had not written a coherent post in a while. So here goes: This is my second semester in Clemson's MAT program and over the course of the last semester I have been wondering if I am meant to teach. Over the last year I have thought over every failure I had student teaching and I have thought about all the obvious solutions to those problems I encountered. Things I should have done, things I knew I could have fixed.
Last semester was my first as a grad student. I quickly realized I had no idea how to be a grad student. There is a certain level of thinking that goes into this level of higher ed that I seem to be lacking in. Two of my professors suggested that maybe teaching English is not what I really have my heart in... and they would be right. Teaching was never my first choice when it came to careers. As long as I can remember - which is pretty far back - I have wanted to be a writer. I even have a novel going, a real novel with a real plot and a real ending. I have been working on this novel for the last year now and I am so close to finishing it.
The question I find I am asking myself these days is what am I doing? Is teaching what I want to do? I love the age group I want to teach - middle school - and I have worked with the age group before but when I was student teaching high school students I found a lot of the things I had enjoyed about school were all the things these students hated. I was getting good feedback from my teacher until she had a medical emergency. When she came back a week later after I had to teach all the classes on my own, usually without a sub in the room, her feedback became practically nonexistent and I could tell she was getting frustrated with me. Our conversations stopped leaving me empowered and left me thinking there was something she was not telling me. After the mid-terms she informed me that my lessons were boring - her words - and that she, me university supervisor, and my professor - who was also my adviser - were all concerned about the work I was doing. This had apparently been something they had all discussed with each other but not me. For a whole half a semester I had been doing something wrong and no one had told me. She also said that her students were not making the grades they should have been. Later it was discovered that she hadn't been putting the grades in correctly. Students who were making As were getting Fs on their report cards. I was close to tears after this conversation. I couldn't speak when she asked me if I had anything to say. What could I? She had made up her mind that I didn't belong in the classroom. She even said she thought that maybe I was not meant to be a teacher, although she tried to say it a little nicer than that.
I want my students to be as excited as I am about reading and writing. I want them to enjoy looking closer at a work of literature and taking it apart. Everyone else in my graduating class seemed to be able to inspire their kids to love whatever their unit was they were teaching. My end result was getting my students to write a short story and to understand what goes into crafting one. At the end of the year when my professor decided that maybe she should sit in on one of my lessons I had already finished my unit and my teacher and I had begun another unit that we were both really excited about teaching. After watching the lesson my professor told me that out of all the students in our class she had the highest expectations of me and that I had failed to meet them. My teacher defended me and I was grateful, if not a little surprised. She told my professor about one of the lessons where the students had really loved it.
We were reading "A Wife's Story" by Ursula K. LeGuin which is a werewolf story with a twist. We talked about what the students already knew werewolves: what they look like, what the transformation process was, what are their weaknesses, their enemies. Then we watched clips from famous werewolf movies like the old and new Wolfman movies, Twilight - not a fan but a good example of the transformation process- and Harry Potter. Then we talked about the differences in what we had seen and what we had already talked about at the beginning of class. Then we read the story. I broke it up into sections and after each section we stopped and discussed what we had just read. I wanted to make sure that when we got to the end everyone would be on the same page for the twist ending. The students loved it and talked about it days later. My B day kids came in excited about the story because they had heard about it from kids in my A day classes.
This was not good enough for my professor. I had decided after I had graded the test I gave that I had done a good job with the kids. I got wonderful stories at the end of the unit and the test scores were better than I had thought they would be. I still got an A in the course because my professor would never give anyone a B because that would reflect on her as well as us. Everyone got an A. Other students in my class - as well as years before us - felt like they had failed on some level as far as our professor was concerned. But we all got through it and came away having learned valuable lessons.
Now I am about to start the whole process all over again. I will begin observations this fall and then I will student teach for the last time a year from now. Since my student teaching experience a year ago I have realized a lot of the mistakes I made and have made notes about what to do the next time I run into a certain situation. I can only hope that going through the masters program will prepare better for what to expect. I have already been encouraged by what I have seen in my classes - all two of them that I have had - and I know I'll be ready this time.
And if I find myself getting overwhelmed again - and I'm sure I will - I will have a cup of tea, relax, and figure out what I'm doing wrong and what I can do better. Luckily for me, I have people around me now that will tell me what they think rather assuming I can read their mind. Communication is something I am always working on and feel it is one of my strong suits but getting people to communicate with me is another thing altogether.
