When I began my journey toward teaching, I had big ideas and plans. Before I graduated, I had already been in the classroom for several student teaching experiences, plus I had written a lengthy paper on my personal teaching philosophy, and of course, raising my children made me feel prepared to step into the classroom. However, I was in for a huge shock when it came to actually being a teacher. In fact, there were several things that I wish I knew about teaching prior to becoming a teacher.
Culture Shock
I’m not sure why I expected every student to be just like me, but for some reason my reality clashed with the realism of it all. You see, they hint at the fact that you may have poverty stricken students in the classroom, and you may have students with single parent households, but they don’t tell you how many.
I’ve taught multiple classes with students from single parent families, students whose grandparents were raising them, and students whose parent(s) were currently in jail. I have also had a parent talk about a child as though that child was not sitting in our presence and make statements that made you want to reach across the table and knock them out, but you can’t do things like that.
I think I have even taught classes where students had never been taught to use a spoon and fork, and students who were so hungry they’d hide the food in their bookbags to take home.
How to teach reading
As a Secondary Education English major, I was prepared to discuss literature. After all, I was well-read and had a love for books as well as a huge collection of said books. I didn’t expect to walk into a high school or middle school classroom and find students who did not know how to read. How do you teach reading?
It was my understanding that children learned to read in elementary school, and middle/high school was where they learned to appreciate great works of literature. I felt completely in over my head, and I was unprepared for such challenges. I took a class on Content Reading Across the Curriculum, but throughout that class, it was never discussed how to teach children who lacked the fundamentals of teaching, and how to teach comprehension.
To be honest, it has only been in the last two years that I’ve learned how to teach comprehension in multiple ways, and that has been through the Seravallo series. I had no idea what a reading record was, or Fountas and Pinnell levels, or how to build fluency. This was like an unknown language to me.
The World’s Most Trusted Supplier of Teaching Resources. Everything a Social Studies, English, or World Language teacher needs to be successful in the classroom.Rigor
I had a principal constantly talk about adding rigor to lessons and making lessons more rigorous, but no one wanted to stop and explain it. In fact, even when I looked it up, I was still confused. Since my first experience with the concept, I’ve learned what it means to have rigorous lessons.
Rigor has to do with challenging students in the real world. For example, my lesson on “The Tale-Tell Heart” and where students assumed the role of psychologists in a trial. That was rigorous.
Things Change
School districts are constantly changing their approach to education. In fact, I’ve seen curriculum rewritten so many time that I didn’t know what we were teaching from one year to the next. I’ve seen teaching methods implemented, strict rules be placed on how lesson plans were written, and districts give us specific ways and in what order we teach our classes.
In other words, you can’t just go in and make a change. Instead you have to make a change within the boundaries and guidelines that your district and/or state provides. This is different from what you picture prior to teaching.
Classroom management
This will vary from year-to-year and student-to-student. What works in one class may not work in another. While there are many different studies and methodologies of classroom management, it is going to take an entirely different approach than just one. Sometimes it takes a mixture and sometimes it takes creating your own.
I’m not disappointed about my teaching experiences. I do wish that I had someone to come along and just remind me that things will not always go as planned, and that my fantasies about teaching were completely that: fantasies.
Would I still teach knowing all of this?
Yes.
Would go about a few things differently?
Yes. In fact, I would’ve taken a course in teaching reading or even researched something other than the classroom management philosophies.
