worksheets

I don't think I was able to reap the full benefits from student teaching. Unlike many of my fellow MTC classmates who were in the high school, I never taught longer than an hour lesson. The day's routine in our class centered around one thing - worksheets. and more worksheets. and getting behind in worksheets and trying to catch up. and finishing all the worksheets and having nothing else to do but draw or read comic books. and then the next day, more worksheets. and getting back graded and marked worksheets, and having to correct them. and correct them again. clearly, this was not the best assessment tool, but the one our teacher chose.

I do not completely blame our teacher. She is a veteran (has taught for 20 plus years) and the 8 students in her summer school 7th grade math class had already been in her class the entire past school year. In her eyes, it was their fault they didn't turn in their homework, study, stay awake in her class, and they ended up in summer school where she was not about to reteach everything she had already taught for the past 9 months. So giving out worksheets was her way of assessing them, without teaching anymore.

And that's where Ruth, Lee, and I came in. I suppose might have actually worked better because she wasn't going to teach, so we could teach on anything we saw fit, especially on the material that they were struggling on. But at the same time, we never could teach long, because we didn't want the students who were already behind in their worksheets to get even further behind because we were teaching on material that they hadn't even gotten to yet (although others had long been done with the material that we were teaching). We got to teach, make lesson plans, try different instructional strategies, and all the things a teacher does, but never with any genuine feeling of ownership of the class. We were somewhere between visitors and teachers...more tutors than instructors, that got to each spend a day doing a half hour to an hour lesson, then spend the remainder of the day in silence, while the students worked on worksheets and we sat on the side, reading Wong and Wong or working on the next day's lesson, with the occasional (and sometimes constant, depending on the worksheet and the student's ability and confidence level) student coming by to ask for help, or raising their hand so we could guide them to the right answer.

And what was the most maddening thing about these pesky worksheets? The students were working diligently, the teacher was taking them up, grading them, the kids were correcting them...and for what? To keep them busy. Our teacher informed us that as long as they were doing the worksheets and turning them in, then that was fine. The kids weren't required to make a certain grade and didn't have to turn a definite amount in. They were just supposed to be working hard. Not much of an assessment...but if they were actually learning it when doing all the worksheets, then it would be okay...but were they?

We were rewarded with the knowledge that we did do some good. On the last day of student teaching, I was being friendly, in a friend, not teacher, sorta way (what did I have to lose?) I was just asking what their summer plans were, and, more importantly, if they had learned anything in summer school. As a pleasant surprise, for those that I asked, every single one of them not only responded in the positive, but with an enthusiastic "Yes!" Of course I loved this.

Still, I can't take too much credit for this. I don't think it's that we were amazing teachers, but more that we were caring. we were new and fresh and ready to prove ourselves and improve the lives of students...and also it's that these students have had too many teachers who either haven't taught effectively, or, more likely, didn't care enough about them to give them confidence to work hard...in this one way-that we haven't gotten into bad habits and have given up on trying to teach-we have an advantage as new teachers.

I completely agree with Ms. Kuhnau: the moment I don't enjoy being a teacher is when I need to stop teaching. Students deserve more than just someone who's teaching just because for the paycheck, or because they've been doing it forever. They deserve to have someone who is engaging, enthusiastic, interesting, caring, fun...I've learned much from student teaching, including a lot of what I should not do. I've also felt the great joy when someone actually gets it, after, perhaps for the first time, they are told that they can do it.