When I decided to take on a student teacher, I never expected to face the kinds challenges that I am currently faced with. I guess I never considered the human side of teaching when volunteering to host another human in my room. Today was a hard day for her. Hell, today was a hard day for many of us. For some reason the students were loud, fidgety, and oblivious to adults in the room. This is where I learned the most. 

For starters, I should definitely do a better job of planning with my student teacher. We walked in without much of a plan today. Okay, let me take that a step back. We definitely had a plan. However, that plan was neither practiced or rehearsed in any way. Therefore, I declare the plan to be half-assed. That’s on me. This seems to be the trap that us teachers fall into when planning with each other. We think that we can just tell someone to do something or take something over without realizing the consequences of such an action. It’s probably one of the biggest reasons why co-teaching is as difficult as it is. I remind myself every day that I need to run through the plan, but here I sit lamenting the fact that I didn’t do so. This reminds me of when I tried to analyze a good lesson and was never fully able to pin down what it was that made the lesson work as well as it did. 

I also realized today that the monumental task of teaching language as we currently are is not conducive to working with a student teacher. The goal of the class is not clear because we really don’t have one. This makes it all the more difficult for her to try to make plans because she doesn’t know where the students are going. In other classes, say Economics, we know what the students need to know at the end of the course. Here in EL200, there aren’t such clearly defined objectives. In college, they always told us to use the state standards and to have an objective posted. Neither of these help a teacher know the purpose of their lessons on the larger scale of a semester. 

These problems never fully went away from my teaching and my district as a whole. However, now that I have someone teaching in my room, they are salient once again.