Gordaen's Blog

The students started back at the high school Tuesday of last week, so it has now been a full week that I’ve experienced being a student teacher (also called an intern). The whole experience has been rather eye-opening, but I don’t know if I could pick just one word or phrase to describe it. Exciting, hard work, lack of sleep, anxiety, energy, … there are so many factors and effects that I’m not quite sure where to start.

Right from the first day, I’ve participated as a teacher (student teachers sometimes start purely as observers before building up to be full-time teachers). Roughly preparing the first two weeks of class was quite a bit different from the way it’s done in college teacher prep courses. Teaching English means that my courses aren’t as set as science and math courses are (usually due to their specific books and budget limits); that’s both a blessing and a curse. I have a lot more freedom with what I teach, but I also have to do a lot more planning.

I have to show up by thirty minutes before the first class (though I always show up a bit earlier than that) and I’m not even sure when I can technically leave (I suspect thirty minutes after the final class ends), but I seem to never finish before 4pm, making it at least a nine hour day. I eat some lunch, but not a big one because I stay busy preparing, grading, reflecting, etc.

I read and graded about sixty papers yesterday and it took me a major chunk of the day. The papers were 1/2 to 1 page and I commented on every single one. When you figure it takes maybe two minutes to read the paper, a minute or two to comment, a minute to record the grade, and a little bit of time to shuffle through them, organize, etc., it ends up being about five minutes per paper. That’s roughly five hours for those papers—five hours for just two of the classes that I teach.

I’ve also taken a major part in working with the students on their culminating projects, which has been a substantial amount of work as well. Their “scholarly papers” are 4-10 pages, plus the works cited page. Reading just one of these and providing good feedback on the rubric usually takes 15-20 minutes… anyway, I don’t want this to sound like a blog post entirely about complaining, so I’ll leave the number of those papers that I’ve done up to your imagination.

The whole experience has made me appreciate the work that good teachers do even more than ever. There are so many skills involved that it’s tough to relate to other jobs. I still have to really develop and hone my abilities, but I think that I am doing relatively well so far. It helps that my cooperating teacher has been able to jump in when I leave out little bits here and there and we’ve fed off each other quite a bit. I think having two teachers in every class (or at least a certified teacher and an assistant) would be awesome and is really a goal we should consider. Class sizes vary from class to class, school to school, state to state, etc., but when you’re looking at classes around and above thirty students, keeping everything going smoothly becomes a considerable task for a single teacher.

As part of the experience, I went to the high school’s football game this past Saturday and watched the school I teach at obliterate the other team. For a while, I wondered what would happen if the score board had to show a score higher than 99.

I’m not sure what all to say, so if you have any questions or comments, feel free to jump in. I’ll either address them in a reply comment or get to them in a future post. I’ll probably try to do a post about my progress with teaching every couple of weeks or so, depending on free time.