Identity Confusion

Obviously, I was pumped to begin teaching before I started TEP or else I never would have applied.  I had it all figured out.  I was going to be the "tough" teacher, I did NOT want to deal with discipline (it's a waste of my time and my education) and I can probably only teach GATE kids.

Then I started student teaching.  It's not like I haven't been in a classroom before, so I'm not really sure why there are huge changes in my attitudes brewing.  Maybe it was our foundations classes, or maybe it's my CT's influence, or maybe it's both, but my thoughts on how I teach and who I want to teach have completely shifted.

As a student teacher, I have a really unique opportunity to work one on one with students way more often than I probably ever will as a "real" teacher.  And I love it!  I always pictured the really rewarding experiences in my career being something huge, like one of my students getting into Harvard or curing cancer, and owing it all to that one English teacher who believed in them.  Instead, the most rewarding experiences are things like a mainstreamed student in special ed finishing a complete sentence, with the advanced vocabulary we practiced, and writing it down on his own.  Without prompting.  Without a single mistake.  For me, that was parade worthy - I was so incredibly proud of what he had accomplished for himself.

Or the successes are the behavior problem that everyone (including, often times, me) has no idea what to do with, finishing a complete worksheet, when the day before he couldn't be convinced to sit in a student chair until the class period was halfway over.  He's the type of classroom management that I absolutely dreaded going into teaching, yet he's the student I'm drawn to when I'm circulating the classroom and I'm just dying to see some successes with him.  And I think they will happen.  Call me crazy (it wouldn't be the first time someone has) but I really really think he's going to figure it out someday and start trying.  I know it may not be realistic, but if we can't still believe that about our most challenging students, should we really be the ones responsible for teaching them?

So it's the moments like that, when a student who struggles with reading picks up a book and reads it on his own, because he can't wait to see what happens next in the story, that are confirming for me why I want to be a teacher.  Summers off will be great, and picking a career that my dad doesn't respect is a thrilling belated act of teenage rebellion, but this stuff is what I'm really here for.  Not the GATE students.  Not the shout out during an Inaugural Address or Academy Awards acceptance speech.  But the little victories that are happening for every single student in the classroom, if we try hard enough to see them.