Teaching, Learning, Adapting

It makes quite a difference in my daily life that I am not driving as much while I am student teaching. Typically I was putting 20-25,000 miles per year on my car. Driving increases my pain due to neck and arm positioning. NOT driving has been wonderful!

My drive to school for student teaching is reasonable and it makes me realize how pain impacts the quality of your life. I am grateful that my pain is manageable 6 years after my car accident. I am grateful that driving less seems to be helping. How strange it is when my 6 year companion of daily pain does not shout at me for attention right now. How strange it is when the ache is like a lawn mower noise in the background; it is there, but it isn't affecting me all that much. Hopefully when student teaching is over I will secure a teaching position that is close to home. Not having to drive long distances is quite helpful to me!

Another thing that is interesting about my student teaching experience is how much my 2002 minor stroke comes into play. I can relate to students with various learning styles because I now understand what it is to be a visual learner. I understand what it means to have to write EVERYTHING down. I know what it is like to have difficulty moving something from my short term to my long term memory. I use myself as an example ALL the time. My high school students are learning from my experience. I had to learn how to learn all over again after my stroke.

My discussions asking them how they learn best have been fascinating. I can relate to ALL of their learning styles (visual, auditory, kinetic, etc...). We discuss learning and they give each other ideas to try. What a great way to help learners learn! They like to have a teacher who will admit academic struggles. They love it that I have to work hard to do well in school. They are fascinated that I used to have a nearly photographic memory and that now I won't remember something from yesterday without some kind of trigger (like a note to myself or just a little more detail on a story they told me). They laugh when I often exclaim "Oh yeah!" as they tell me again and the light bulb goes on for me.

It isn't that I'm stupid or don't pay attention, it is that I don't access the memory that is stored as easily as I once did. My students also get a kick out of how hard I work to learn their names. I can come back from a weekend and find that I've lost some of their names. If I don't use the name often, it is gone and not accessible for immediate recall. My students now realize I will never forget their faces, but their names which I called Friday may not be there for me Monday! I have learned that this is okay. I accommodate by taking a lot of notes. You can accommodate for memory issues if you are willing to work at it.

The workload is pretty insane right now for me. Learning how to be a teacher is great -- it is just difficult since there are only so many hours in the day. Each new experience takes me longer now than it will when I am a seasoned teacher. I am tired from all the hours spent with essays. My cooperating teacher reminded me not to spend more time on an essay than the student did.... interesting way to think of it. I am going to let them do the rewrites and wrestle with their own errors. She made a good point in that they will learn from having to find the error (we indicate what line, they need to find the error on the line) and then correct it. True that! I correcting the error am teaching them nothing. Letting them find and correct it forces an investment of time and brain power which will result in learning. Can I just have 5 more hours in each day so I can turn these papers around more quickly?

I get it teachers -- you deserve those summers off since much of the school year you are working double time! I also see why teachers don't want to change what courses they teach. It is much more fun for me to tweak a lesson than to create one. A lot of planning goes into a semester and it is so much simpler to adjust content when you already have the skeleton on which to layer the muscle. The thought of finding out what you are teaching and then starting the next day blows my mind. I like to plan ahead and my current workload doesn't allow for it as much as I'd like... Juggling family obligations on top makes the challenge greater. As much as I love student teaching I will love teaching more when I've secured a job and have my own classroom. I love the students that I've been loaned. It would be wonderful to teach in this school someday...