Teachers Make the World Go 'Round

The past three months, I have been completing my student teaching at Teton High School. All education majors must participate in a semester of student teaching the last semester of their college career. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to student teach in my home town for the high school that I graduated from. Here is the desk that I have sat and worked at all semester.

When you do your student teaching, you are assigned a cooperating teacher. You work with this teacher and slowly take over all but one or two of their classes. I was assigned to Brian Schultz. He has taught at THS for about 5 years. His first year of teaching was actually when I was a senior. Thus, I already knew who he was even though I never had him as a teacher. He as been very patient and helpful to me this semester. He is also the volleyball coach. I had the chance to practice with the varsity volleyball team about once or twice a week during the season. That was a lot of fun! Here is Mr. Schultz right here.

 I have really enjoyed this experience very much. It has been challenging but also rewarding. I have learned that teaching is hard work. Some people think that teaching is an 8:00 - 3:00 job. However, teachers spend all day trying to teach kids important lessons and life skills when many of them are unresponsive and unappreciative of anything you have to tell them. Then you go home and grade papers and create lesson plans until your eyes want to bleed.  Even though you do get some of those kids that make you want to never procreate, the majority of them are great. Some other lessons I have learned from student teaching are:

1. Your room will constantly smell like stinky feet if have multiple classes of 30 hormonal freshmen coming straight from P.E. who try to make themselves seem cool as they do their math.

2. The more you make students laugh, the more likely they will come to like you as a teacher.

3. At the beginning of the semester, all of the students will think that you are a strange alien from outer space since no person on Earth would want to do and teach math for a living. At the end of the semester, they no longer think you are an alien but rather a normal human being with a personality and interests. (Though they will still think you are weird because you like math.)

4. Even though you think you are teaching students a lesson by giving them more homework, you are really just creating extra work for yourself. Who do you think is going to have to grade all of those assignments? The Algebra Bunny?

5. Students think that if they aren't looking at you then you can't see them.

6. Freshman are more forgetful than a 95-year-old man with Alzheimer's. You could do an entire test review and tell them to study 5 times during the class period, and they still won't remember there is a test the next time they show up to class.

7. Students will drop $5 a piece to go on a donut run, but they won't drop $12 to buy a calculator to bring to class.

8. There will always be those kids that you find to be very strange. Then you go to parent/teacher conference and realize that those students got their weirdness from their parents.

9. You will enjoy your job even more if you spend time with other teachers outside of the classroom. I joined an exercise group started by some of the female HS teachers. I have thoroughly enjoyed this experience. Not only do I get to exercise on a daily basis to feel healthier, I get to gossip about students and other teachers to the ladies in my group. Most of the time I am simply listening and soak up all of the juicy, juicy stories.

10. Teaching is worth all of the effort when you get those seldom parents who tell you that you've made a difference in their child's life.