Final Thoughts on Student Teaching

But first, some numbers!
636: hours spent at Grandville Middle School since January 30
215: students' names learned
5: detentions given
121: slices of ham in my sandwiches
1.9: miles between my home and GMS
46: pages of unit plan fabulosity
901: emails deleted in my school email
0: weekly income in dollars (lol)
2: Facebook friend requests (so far)

(The next bit is taken directly from my final journal of the semester since I didn't feel like rephrasing/re-writing it)


I spent my final afternoon at GMS walking around the hallway with a student after school. She had a lot going on in her life at that moment and didn’t have many friends at school. Basically, she just needed someone to listen to her while she talked. I was happy to be that person, and honestly, I wish I had more time in the school day to do that. We wandered around in a square until her mom showed up, which ended up being a solid twenty minutes after school had let out. This student acts so much older than an 8^th grader, so it didn’t surprise me to learn that she didn’t connect well with students her own age. Add to that her weight and her intelligence, and before me was a very lonely girl.


Over the course of student teaching, I have come to realize that full-time teaching may not be where I want to be at the end of higher education. I love Spanish, I love students, and I love the school environment. The only thing missing is the passion for teaching itself. I’m reasonably talented at teaching Spanish, but I have more passion for the students themselves. I like learning everything about them: what part of town they live in, what types of friends they have, what factors inhibit their learning, etc. I don’t like having to label their work with a grade. I don’t like taking action that might make them feel bad about themselves. I don’t like managing or disciplining them. People this age are vulnerable enough already.


So what is a girl to do after four years of working toward a degree that will enable her to teach full-time and do exactly the things that she tries to avoid? Answer: she goes to graduate school for a Masters in School Counseling, a degree which will allow her to talk to and listen to students all day. Well, more or less. After completing student teaching, I determined that several key factors of teaching – lesson planning, curriculum, being in front of a crowd all day, etc. – never entered my sphere of enthusiasm by the end. I think I was hoping that by the time I finished, those things would come more naturally to me and I would learn to love them.  A teacher should have a strong interest in those aspects before beginning a full-time job, not struggle through with the hope that that interest will appear someday.


Instead, I feel I should play to my strengths – one-on-one relationships, patience in listening, and a passion for students’ well-being. I have a heart for students who are hurting, undoubtedly because I know what it feels like to be that hurting student. I have so much insight to offer them as a result of the years that I spent hurting and lonely. God pulled me through those past experiences for a reason, and maybe this is the reason. There were adults in my life to come alongside me during my time, and now it’s time for me to turn around and give back.

Perhaps the biggest indicator to me that I should pursue school counseling is the genuine enthusiasm I feel when I think and talk about these plans. I’ve spent many years pretending to portray a certain image on the outside, and I fear that it eventually seeped into my feelings about teaching. I successfully fooled myself. Essentially, I faked it ‘til I made it. This is not to say that teaching was wrong for me from the start. It’s more that student teaching confirmed for me that the classroom is not the place in which I can do the most good. I’m reasonably assured that in the classroom, I did well. But more than doing well, I want to do good.  God has blessed me with a unique ability to understand and care about adolescents. The one-on-one aspect of student teaching absolutely fulfilled me, but dividing my attention among lesson planning, curriculum, management, discipline, and all the relationships wore me out. A more direct method of using my gifts would be school counseling. It looks like I’ll be staying in the land of higher education a little bit longer.