thoughts on New Year's Eve

It's about 3:30 pm and I've just returned from Alvin & the Chipmunks with my kids. It's been a good Christmas break--I've focused almost entirely on family and Christmas. For the last few days I've worked very hard on National Latin Teacher Recruitment Week stuff (go here http://www.cafepress.com/animaaltera/268757 to see the new products). Today I've done a fair amount of grading, but there's still so much to do. SO INCREDIBLY MUCH!

Yes, yes, I know I vowed to grade one hour a day each day over break. But I didn't. I was hitting burn out with my current work load, admittedly, and just needed a total break. I just did. I couldn't cope with the emails waiting for me when I got home--it was all just too much. I needed to rest and revive.

And I did, as the 48 hours of hard work on the NLTRW stuff proves. When I taught parttime at a middle school I was at my best. I was teaching AND I had time for all the promotional work I do AS WELL AS time to truly reflect upon my teaching and how to improve things.

I have this reputation as being some great, knowledgeable teacher. I dunno about that. I think I'm pretty good at what I do some days, but then my Latin 2/3 split class is really pretty much not where I want it to be, and I was their teachere last year so who should I blame? Ha.

Ok, well, if I could just have only the best kids stay in Latin and have the others disappear, then of course I would have brilliant classes. BUT THAT'S JUST A PIPE DREAM! I'm not going to weed out my classes, even if others do that. Well, there are a couple of people I don't intend to let go on to Latin 3 next year, that's for sure.... ok, well, we'll see. It's just very hard to teach the student whose schedule is so full that can't come by during tutorials and who doesn't have email so they can't email you with Latin questions. Cop-outs on their part, I'm sure.

Well, whatever.

It occurred to me that my principal said that we will most likely need another Latin teacher next year because of the demand at the high school AND at the middle school. And if we can really get a second teacher (something that makes me VERY nervous), what if... what if I could maybe just have a couple of Latin preps and the other teacher have the other Latin preps? I'd gladly teach the middle schoolers--something many Latin teachers want to avoid. I wonder... boy, I wonder if that's at all possible? I could go from 5 preps to 2 or 3 tops!

Wow.

Just thinking outloud.

oh, OUCH, that hurt!

From Latinteach:

>>>But I did not fit with this middle school mentor teacher. Notice I said I did not fit with the teacher, not the school. I did leave that middle school to return to Mrs. Fugate's high school to complete my student teaching, but not because I could not handle the students. In fact, that middle school was nothing compared to where I am now. I returned to Susan because I felt like I had learned so muchfrom her and her million years of experience. I would not be the teacher I am today were it not for her mentoring. True mentoring.



I was that middle school teacher. She had real classroom management issues, and I tried to tell her what she was doing wouldn't work--but I didn't really have a better solution--and the next thing I knew she was gone and I had no lesson plans ready to go.

I don't fault her in some ways.

But she's saying that I didn't do any true mentoring. And I also remember a number of things she didn't like about Mrs Fugate's teaching method.

But this hurts. She goes on to say this:

>>>I guess that is one thing that I think new teachers, not just Latin teachers, need: a good mentor. Again, as KZ said, teacher retention problems are not just unique to the Latin teacher profession--I see it all over the place. From my own experience, I can say that the first mentor teacher I was given (the middle school one) was just not what I needed/wanted, and I sincerely feel if I had stayed with this teacher, I would probably have quit teaching. Really. And that is not to say that this teacher was a bad teacher, but just did not fit my needs and desires. Fortunately, I knew where to go to for guidance, and so I requested a switch.

I lead NLTRW and learn this... I always, always felt she left because she didn't know what to do with those students. She never wanted to listen to anything I had to say. She didn't understand, for instance, that these students--these low income students with next to no academic expectations--wouldn't/couldn't read the culture on their own, but it needed to be covered thoroughly in class. Did I hold their hands too much? Maybe I did. That was my worst year with Latin 1a at Porter--30 kids in one class (if not two?), several with learnding disabilities and emotional disabilities. It was after that year that I explored better classroom management via Wong's _First Days of School_. I explored cooperative work strategies so that more students would and could complete assignments. I did have students that year in Latin 1b who got medals on the NLE. So I wasn't doing all bad.

But hercle this hurts. I have enough issues with self-doubt. I constantly question the quality of my Latin instruction, culture instruction, pacing, grading, EVERYTHING. I don't blame the students until I know that *I* personally have done everything possible to help that student achieve, including teaching test taking strategies, mnemonic devices, quia reviews out the whazoo, you name it.

I thought the difficulty had been teaching in an inner city school.
She said it was working with me. I would have driven her from the profession.

She added this:

>>>Colleges and universities need to really think about who they place their student teachers with, and personally, I just don't think I am quite ready to have a student teacher, maybe in a few years, but not now. So, I guess what I am saying is that we need to develop a new list of "master teachers" and mentors for our student teachers, give these to the colleges, and provide more than 1 choice for those new teachers because sometimes they just don't click.

So I guess I would not be on a master teacher list in her book. And as for having 2 teachers, well, that's hardly applicable in most cities.



Man, I am still highly agitate about this. I just wrote this as part of my reply to her note:

>>>Be glad you could leave your first situation that sounded so dreadful and go to your second at the IB school. Did you ever have the courtesy to discuss your problems with your first mentor? Communication, so often, is the key. For all you know she's (or he's?) probably just thought you couldn't handle the students and had no earthly idea that the problem was with her/him. I'm assuming you let your university professors know? Well, with luck she hasn't had any student teachers since you.

Probably too catty of me; I probably shouldn't have done it. But I really am pissed. She left me in the lurch, never wanted to hear my take on the problem students, and thought all the problems there were MY FAULT.... Ok, the classroom management issues in part WERE my fault. AND I FIXED THEM the following year.

But sheesh.... what I had originally used for classroom management had worked in previous years. The kids that year were just really, really challenging.

gotta go & calm down.

problems with student teaching

Ok, I've calmed down. And I've been thinking.

Yeah, my own student teaching was a horrible experience in many ways. 1st, the woman I did it with (passed away a couple of years ago), was truly two-faced. She milked me for all I was worth before state competition, having me come to school early to train her certamen teams, stealing my materials and using with her late afternoon classes without my knowledge (until I walked into class one day to get something I left)... I mean, she could have asked permission.

My supervising professor, Gareth Morgan, was an amazing man who was really interested in teaching and helping me to become a good teacher. He asked to see what I was the worst at--and in this case it was reading/translating with students. My supervising teacher always divided the class into groups, gave each group a paragraph, so in essense students only did one or two students individually. We had talked about this in advance. Then on the day Gareth was to come, I got really sick. I had a fever. I skipped my morning classes with the understanding from the teacher that she please, please, please do the lesson with those kids the way I had planned so both classes would be at the same place. Did she do this? No.

I dragged my feverish ass up to school. Gareth came. Poor Gareth saw a horrible class, so horrible that he fell asleep--not that I noticed, but the students did. After class one particular stereotypical dumb blonde (no offense! and I have blonde children!) dance team girl type came up to apologize for how bad class was/how poorly they performed.

I was feverish, frustrated, and upset with the teacher for not doing the one thing I asked, AND THEN this teacher started to totally CHEW ME OUT for doing translation on a day that an EVALUATOR came! I mean she chewed me up one side and down the other, making it very clear that the last thing you ever do when an evaluator came was translation. I tried to explain that Gareth knew it would be a bad class, that he wanted to see it so we could discuss what to do to make it better. She didn't care. She didn't care at all.

And all of this was before things really got bad in her room.

At state JCL competition, the certamen teams I trained did well and placed. One of my old high school chums came up to congratulate me and my supervising teacher. The teacher took it as her praising me, a San Antonio trained JCLer, and no one else. Which wasn't true. Not at all. So the next day we're in the teacher's workroom/lunchroom and we were talking about competition in front of some English teachers and ALL OF A SUDDEN FROM OUT OF NOWHERE she totally tore into me about the San Antonio teachers running everything. MAN, it came out of left field. I don't know WHAT was going on in her warped mind, but I'm guessing in retrospect that she was somehow threatened by me. I dunno.

When I only had about 2 weeks left of my student teaching, she switched the seating arrangement in the room so that the two sides faced each other. Maybe it was only 1 week left. All I know is that things had gotten so bad by this time that one day when I was walking across the UT campus I debated stepping out in front of a car, wondering whether I might only break my leg or if I'd accidentally kill mysel--I was that miserable and depressed. THEN she switched the room, which made my classroom management problems a nightmare, and they were already bad.

It was before school when I had discovered the change in the seating arrangement, and for whatever reason I was so overwhelmed by this that I escaped to the teacher's workroom. No one was in there at first so I sat myself in a corner and admittedly started to cry. One of the English teachers that I observed came in and kindly asked what was wrong. I told her--I thought in confidence. I just didn't understand why my supervising teacher couldn't wait one more week until I was gone... Well, the English teacher mentioned it to my teacher. When class began and students started filing into the room and COMPLAINING about the seating arrangement, thinking I had done it, I calmly explained it wasn't me and that it wouldn't be a problem (as if it were no big deal). The teacher then spoke up, loudly, in front of all the students, that yes, she had done the change and that IT WASN'T FOR OTHER TEACHERS TO KNOW--that is, I shouldn't have gone crying to someone about it. Which is NOT what I had done!!! I had just given myself a time-out so I could cope with the change.

AND I SURVIVED. I survived and learned and all that.

So maybe I wasn't a good supervising teacher when it was my turn. I did try to let her do stuff her own way, or at least I believe I did. I tried not to micromanage. Did I have all the answers? No. I had never experienced students as badly behaved as the ones I had that year, and I freely admitted that my classroom management plan that I had used previously wasn't working with them. And even if mine didn't work well, I could see the gimmicks she was trying as just gimmicks. I could point out why they wouldn't work, or would only work temporarily. She didn't listen, or she just simply believed I was wrong.

The problem with a lot of those students that year was bottom of the barrel self esteem. Self-esteem that was so low that it was easier to blow off a test and fail because you didn't try, than to try and fail anyway. And if they've decided that they can't do it, they become horrible behavior problems. One of those kids repeated Latin 1, failed it again, and was upset that I wouldn't let him into Latin 1b. And I had had this kid in exploratory. I had already had him for 3 years. He had serious ADHD, extremely low self-esteem, and even though I worked hard to help him along, he just kept giving up on himself.

The class my student teacher had included 3-5 kids just like him, all feeding off each other, etc.

And maybe my own inability to have established a classroom management system that really worked BEFORE she arrived did set her up for failure in some ways. (But I didn't know I had problems with classroom management before that year!) But she also didn't try to understand the real problems with those students, esp those kids with low self-esteem. Or at least, that's what I thought. I could be wrong. I could be way, way off.

So does anyone have a GOOD student teaching experience? Well, they must. After all, even my student teacher did say she had a great experience at the school she went to. AND I AM GLAD SHE DID. I'M GLAD SHE KNEW SHE HAD TO FIND SOMEONE SHE CONNECTED WITH. I'm not so anal that I believe I should be everyone's cup of tea. I know I'm not. I fully realize that.

And what do we get from this rant? Maybe a better awareness of how difficult this aspect of teacher training is, how emotionally charged it is, how frustrating, how critical, etc. This is one of those things many people hate, many people want to skip, etc.

But as I sit with Scrubs and Greys Anatomy playing in the background, I am reminded that internships for doctors can be equally emotional and frustrating (of course if not more so!). But doctors understand that there is a pecking order, that there is a certain way you do things or you do jump when someone says jump because it is life or death. Teaching is a personal profession with so much at stake: you are training a future teacher AND risking your own students. The only person with nothing at stake is the supervising professor, frankly.

Is there a better alternative to student teaching? A necessary evil? Maybe just a lot more shadowing and mini-teaches without the stress of longterm teaching?

Well, I dunno... but if you are having, have had, or suspect you are about to have a horrible student teaching experience, you are not alone! And it doesn't mean the world has come to the end....