Coming to Terms with my Profession

As I enter my last leg of education courses before student teaching and my future career as an English teacher I feel excited and a little nervous. I am most excited about being a role model and helping students inspire themselves. I guess in a way I am hoping for the idealist nature of being a teacher. I know that it is naïve to think that teaching is all rainbows and butterflies but I think that teaching may be one of the most rewarding professions. I love the satisfaction of helping a student work through a challenging Shakespeare plot or complete a poem. I love the way a student lights up from their success. I think that seeing a student’s achievement will help get me through the rough spots of teaching.

I think I am prepared to challenge students to think and introduce new and exciting lessons. We have all had those teachers who have bored us beyond reason. In reverse, the teachers who made us think outside of the box. I plan to be the teacher who makes student’s brains hurt at the end of class. After all of the training we have had in teaching reading and teaching writing, I feel prepared to supply my students with lessons that matter. Students want a purpose behind a lesson and I can give them one. Moreover, I really care about being a teacher; I have a passion. I think that because I am so interested in this career I will be able to give students an answer to why we learn the things we learn in school.

I am most worried about being able to help all my students. I know that I am going to be responsible for teaching students of all different learning backgrounds and I am scared that I won’t be able to help them all. Along those lines, I worry about pacing lessons. How do you know when to move on with a lesson? If your students really do not understand, where do you go from there? I feel like it is so hard to anticipate these things and I worry about my flexibility as a teacher. I think that these things will come with time but as a first year teacher, I believe that simple things like pacing a lesson will be grueling.

Another thing I worry about it class management and discipline. Every teacher has their own theory on classroom management and I wonder what mine will be. I worry that when I substitute or start my career, students will take advantage of me for being the new teacher. In fact, I am sure that they will do this because I have seen the way my own classmates have acted towards substitutes in high school. I really can’t wait to learn about classroom management more this year because this is one area that I am truly weary of.