Reflecting on my student teaching experience:

Wow, it’s finally come, the end of my student teaching semester.
How do I feel? I feel relieved. I don’t, unfortunately, feel as relieved as I was hoping that I would feel. These projects, this semester, this experience, has been just another step in my seemingly never-ending professional life. I naively thought that it would have been an ending. But now, I find that I need to jump through the right hoops in the right order to get my license, and then an interview (likely many), and then hopefully a job. After that, there will be more hoops to jump as a new employee in a district, a new teacher, and a new colleague. All along the way I will need to build new relationships, new understandings, and reflect on everything. The best part of all this, of course, is that I love it.
It feels strange to go back into the classroom that I called my own for three months. It feels uncomfortable and strange, like when I was little and lost a tooth, nudging the empty socket with my tongue where my tooth had been, and realizing that it was gone, but that a new tooth would grow, and I could already feel it poking through. I know that this class has been “lost” and that I will “grow” a new class, but I can’t feel it “poking through” quite yet, and it makes me nervous and uneasy.
Visiting my old classroom makes me feel guilty. When I visited for the first time the other day, one of my students asked me, “Srta. Annie, where have you been?” When I answered that I had been “working,” her response was a knowing nod. I know she nodded because her father left for “work” in September and hasn’t been back since. Unfortunately, he is likely deported; I am just working on finishing a semester of graduate school. My student doesn’t yet know the difference. I am happy she doesn’t.
I miss my students, but selfishly, I miss what I got out of the successes that we had in the classroom together more than the students themselves. I miss seeing the “ah-ha” moments and working on something really hard, and over, and over, and over, until I knew that they understood what I wanted them to understand. I get a lot out of the successes of my students, and in that way, I am a strange kind of selfish.
I don’t like to complain, so I’ll only do a little of it.
My cooperating teacher sucked. She sucked in a deceptive way. To the outside person, we got along well; we had several things in common: we’re optimistic, we’re enthusiastic, we make do and move on. On closer inspection by my colleagues, my principal, and my advisor, however, it was quickly obvious that the things that were working in our classroom were organized, reinforced, and maintained by the students and myself. Her role was minimal, but that was good, because her lack of organization, irresponsibility and inability to be counted on or to follow through provided for blaring failures when she did take something on.
She was welcoming and enthusiastic in the beginning of the year but her disorganization and lack of control over her own life outside of the classroom translated into a rocky and horrible example of how to begin the year. I learned, of course, by her bad example how to do things better. It would have been more fun and less work to have learned from a great example.
This profession, teaching, seems very masochistic and addicting; it lifts you up higher than high when you do something well and the class just seems to “get it” all; it slams you against the wall when a lesson flops and the class flies out of control. It all happens within the four walls of your very own kingdom, your classroom, and no one, not even your closest, most wonderful colleagues really understand exactly how you feel. But there is great reward in doing things well, and even more reward in fixing things to make them better. There is also an incredible thrill at doing it all, mostly independently, because of your own hard work and toil. Cooperative teaching opportunities are even harder work, and even more rewarding. Because of the yanking and pushing, teaching is addictive. I’m always searching for the wonderful experiences, stumbling over the awful ones, and pushing on, in search of impossible perfection.
The best part of all this, of course, is that I love it.