Flexibility Wanted: Inquire Within

If there's one thing that being a student teacher (teacher candidate, as it's called in my program) has taught me, it's flexibility. I know, it sounds strange...you would think a mom of two small kids would have already been taught this lesson. But, flexibility has never been easy with me when it comes to certain things.

Last year, in my first semester of student teaching, I was assigned to a brilliant first grade teacher. She was also the type of person that thinks out loud and thinks too fast for the average Jane (like me) to follow. Ideas would flow from her lips, but would usually sound like a directive for me. As I would begin doing something, she would stop me, and send me in another direction. Things got really tough when we had to switch from teaching 1st grade to teaching 2nd grade in the third week of school, because the numbers had dropped and classes had to be shifted. This is when I saw a professional teacher pretty much melt down emotionally. I didn't even blame her because I would have done the same thing. All the while she was apologizing to me, saying that this was her hardest year teaching yet. It was a hard semester for me, but I learned a ton in her classroom, and was able to observe someone who really used best practices.

In my second semester of student teaching, I had been told I would report back to the same elementary school after Christmas. One week before school started, I was told a mistake had been made and that I would need to report to a high school in a different school district. This terrified me (as I've noted in previous posts). I came into a school that wasn't prepared for a student teacher of special education, and was placed with a general education algebra teacher. I was encouraged to make what I could of the experience. After a great amount of support from one of my professors, I fought to be moved to the special education department, where I basically designed my own internship experience. I was later told that they liked what I did so much that they were using it as a model for future student teachers.

This semester I'm back in an elementary school, and I'm with a special education teacher full time. Again, a brilliant teacher. Again, lots of anomalies to deal with. Somehow I seem to attract anomalies. We started the school year in a class room the size of my living room that had three teachers, a speech therapist, a school psychologist, and two student teachers all working out of it (this is typical for special education). Because the room was so small that there was almost no room for groups to meet in it, we have been taking our groups to the cafeteria and the paper closet! My teacher - the one I'm student teaching under - was just able to move into a regular classroom that was vacated for the rest of the year. As a result, we've lost all kinds of things. There have been no lesson plans, and she's been pretty much running in survival mode for the past two months as she waited for this classroom to become available. All the while, she is very bothered about the kind of experience I'm getting and the fact that we haven't been using lesson plans, etc. I know that this has also been one of the hardest times for her in her teaching career. The important thing though, is that I'm still learning. I'm still picking up all sorts of tidbits from this amazing teacher. Has it been easy? No. Would lesson plans help? Definitely! But, I wouldn't trade this experience for any other one.

My point with all of this rambling is that so often flexibility leads to great reward. If I wasn't in a program where I'm required to stick it out, I might have given up a long time ago. Compared to the experiences of some of my peers, this has seemed really frustrating at times, and I've definitely shed some tears. But, when we go around the table and talk about what we've learned, I'm almost always the one who feels that I'm getting a lot from my experience.

Looking back, I know that God has carried me through this experience. Placing me with people from whom I've gleaned so much information, and with people who are passionate and compassionate; the kind of teachers I want teaching my own children.