Letting off Some Steam - Online Reflection 1

Letting Off Some Steam

By Megan Rodriguez

You will have those bad days.

Just accept it right now.

You will wake up one morning in bed from 2 hours of sleep.

Okay, to be honest you weren’t in bed.

You were at your home desk with papers sticking to your face.

Do you remember how young kids thought their teachers lived in their classrooms?

From time to time I could be okay with that.

It would save me gas driving to and from home.

It’s not just the lack of sleep that is the problem though.

Remembering you are a STUDENT teacher is hard sometimes.

I think that I must work and teach at the same level as my MT

With a ¼ or more of the experience.
But things will get better.

It is also hard remembering you also have a class (or classes for some) to attend.

Like I have time to do homework when I am busy creating it for my students.

I guess this multitasking is what experts call ‘adulthood’.

If I knew back in kindergarten a real job would be this hard,

I would have worked harder at being a professional colorer.

-Back to being a STUDENT teacher-

This semester is meant to be my experimental time.

Do I have a strategy or idea that I want to try?

Now is the time to do that, but it is hard to accept that in doing this I will make mistakes.

Don’t be fooled, the students know exactly what you are.

You are a student just like them who is getting experience

 and they decide that they (all 200 of them) need to be that one difficult student

a student teacher can learn from.

At least that has been my experience so far.

Okay, I might be exaggerating a little bit (okay a lot).
But things will get better.

 I guess I shouldn’t be complaining too much.

I have it good compared to others.

I don’t have a husband or children to take care of on top of this.

Which is fortunate because I still cannot take care of myself.

But I better get a move on because in less than 6 months

I will have at least 100 kids to take care of.

Thankfully it is easier to take care of someone else than it is to take care of yourself.

I have many things that I need to work on.

Slowing down is one of them. Being impatient is a weakness for me.

My fear is that I will move too slow that my students lose their attention from my lesson.

I am also afraid of wasting valuable class time.

This semester is about learning balance.

Balancing my planning time and social life.

Balancing instruction time with think and work time.

Balancing my emotions between classes and students.

 But things will get better.

Not now.

Probably not next year.

Probably not the year after that.

But eventually.