It is. Quickly. This coming week will bring me my halfway point. I'll be 30 days into student teaching, 18 days into full-control teaching. Crazy. Here's some highlights of what I've learned so far:
1. There is a direct relationship between how much I sleep a night and how well I can answer my students' questions.
2. Always check to see if you've written down the grades before you hand them back to the students. There are two parts to dealing with homework: grading and recording.
3. It is extremely useful to be anal about being organized. I could spend half a day organizing my stuff to try to stay on top of it. I don't do that, but I do spend a couple of hours every weekend purely on organizing my stuff.
4. Teaching can give you a self-esteem boost. I have a pair of students who said they realized they can't do anything without me. They said I have to go with them everywhere they go for the rest of their lives because they're always lost without me. They said we'd be dawgs. =)
5. Teaching can give you a reality check. Sometimes it's tempting to get caught up in the desires to be liked by students, but then I realize how truly shallow most of their 'liking' is. Establishing myself on that is a good way to fail.
6. Though being liked isn't necessary, it sure makes it a lot easier to run a class.
7. I don't know enough ways to say "Be quiet and sit down." Luckily, I can follow in my teacher's footsteps. Though I'm not nearly as effective as she is, a look of complete exasperation is one of the most effective ways I know to get high-schoolers to be quiet (No one wants to be thought of as annoying by the college girl!).
8. Generally teachers feel the same way about other teachers, convocations, and school policies as students do. They just hide it from the students.
9. I'm a grown up. And I'm okay with that.
10. I don't have time or the energy for anything beyond maintaining necessary relationships. I've stopped singing, playing guitar, playing piano, reading, playing games, and all unnecessary cleaning and organizing. This is sad. I need summer.
11. Teaching should only be done by old people. College students need too much sleep to function properly to run a classroom and have a life outside of it. Probably people will disagree with me on that, but statistically it's true. If I want to get the 9 hours of sleep I should get, I would have 3 hours of free time a night (at least half of which would be used to grade papers), and I would never see my roommates.
12. Weekends are truly the greatest thing ever. Even with a huge list of things to do, the weekends are a magical time full of sleep and t-shirts and flexible schedules and fun times and friends and no peanut butter and jelly. It's glorious. =)
There's the short list. Time for my magical weekend!
1 comments:
1. That's a good thing to learn now.
4. Indeed.
5. Also indeed. They're very fickle.
7. Way to capitalize on that!
8. Sometimes more effectively than others. :-)
10. That's no good!
11. One of our teachers goes to bed every night at 8. Maybe teaching is for people who are too old to care if they have a life.
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