My MTC Experience

People always say that you spend the best four years of your life at college. Well, they’re right. MTC has been an incredibly memorable experience, as I’m sure the first two years of teaching always are, but I can’t say it’s been the best time of my life. I can say it has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s been a time when all your weaknesses and faults are exposed and are exaggerated. Your life rarely goes outside of teaching, planning, or grading, as is evident by the constant vis-à-vis marker remnants on fingers and how conversations too often revolve around what James did or what the principal didn’t do or what Rachel said. You have to give up a part of yourself, your interests, your time...

I came into MTC completely naïve. Although I was supposedly a “Ford Fellow” at Millsaps, meaning it’s sort of student teaching with a research component, I really had no previous experiences to prepare me for teaching. I had very little experience teaching in front of a large group, and no experience being the one completely responsible for choosing, planning, and creating a lesson. I remember actually being scared during the student teaching at Oxford Middle School, during peer teaching, and the first weeks at HCHS. I remember Ruth, Lee, and I just dipping our feet into the wide pool of teaching during student teaching. We didn’t know what we were doing; we were just pretending, and I don’t think we really did that great of a job at that. Yet now, seeing Lee make his final presentation (much louder and with a lot more confidence), I see how far many of us have come. (I wish I could have gotten there, too.)
Listening to Anderson’s presentation, I think we spend our first year(s) of teaching trying on different teaching personas. We all have our favorite teachers, and we try to be like them because it worked for them. Yes, some things about teaching are universal. You have to be consistent, firm, approachable, organized, observant, all-knowing… yet we have to find out our own way of teaching. I’ve done just this changing room of personalities, and, unfortunately, I have done it both years, perhaps because what worked last year didn’t work this year, or what I tried differently didn’t work, either. It worked during student-teaching last summer at Holly Springs, but that was a different case all together. (Holly Springs students are not HCHS geometry students.)

I’ve been coining too many phrases, but it’s true that you’ve gotta learn the hard way. I’m still learning. I’ll never stop, I know that, but right now if I keep going the way I am going, well, let’s just say I wouldn’t last another year where I’m at. I wear myself out, I plan too much, I yell too often. Somewhere I’ve missed out on making that connection with my students. I haven’t been myself around them, I haven’t learned how to react the right way to them to show I am in control but I care about them. I won’t bore you with complaining, but I am disappointed that I have not “grown” more than I have. I am not used to failure, and I do feel I have failed myself. I say that I want to stay one more year to leave feeling satisfied, that I’ve won, but I am currently having second thoughts of remaining.

On a completely different note, one of the blessings and burdens of MTC are the classes. Yes, we all hate having any extra work beyond what we already have to do for the classes we teach, and having to drive 3+ hours to Oxford, but at the same time it was wonderful coming back on those weekends to see familiar and similarly weary looking faces. I have a hard time giving myself a break, and I actually let myself on those Fridays and Saturdays. It was relaxing to be sitting as a student than standing in the front as a teacher. It was also refreshing to hear what my peers were doing in their respective schools, what was working and what wasn’t working, to know we were all just barely getting by together. I enjoyed some classes, learned little in others, but it was nice all the same, to me, by all of us just being there together, every time.
MTC tried to get us ready as teachers, and was somewhat successful. Nothing could completely prepare you for teaching. I believe that MTC is heading the right direction by having new teachers teach summer school all summer- get them in the classrooms, get them teaching, trying new ideas, managing people, planning, grading… all the parts of teaching that make it both strenuous and rewarding.

I certainly don’t regret becoming a part of this program. I regret not taking the time my summer between my first and second years to reevaluate myself and prepare better. I regret not using my strengths and doing what I know is right and must be done to grow more. I regret not becoming the teacher that others think I have become. Wherever I teach next year, (which I am still thinking my current school), I know I will do better, for my students, but also selfishly, for me.