Why My Posts Haven’t Been About Teaching

New and Cautious

            Although student teaching is going to be a huge part of my life, I can’t write about it that much. As of when I’m writing, it hasn’t started yet, which is why I haven’t talked that much about it yet. Tomorrow’s the first day with actual students and regular bell schedules and all of that. However, even after my first day, I have reservations about writing about student teaching due to privacy reasons. I’m not even a new teacher; I am a new student teacher. While I understand I do not have to be scared, I do want to be really careful. This school, and my mentor teacher especially, have been gracious enough to allow me to study at the school and teach their students. Therefore, I don’t want to make any waves.

Old Intimidations Die Hard

            In one class I had, the professors took every chance they had to scare and intimidate us. They brought up story after story of students who did things you obviously shouldn’t do. Nevertheless, after hearing so many worse case scenarios, it began to feel almost inevitable that we would each make some egregious error or another no matter how hard we tried to avoid it. They were wrong of course; everything has gone fine. But I still have lingering after-effects of anxiety from those over hour-long seminars of non-stop negativity.

Eventually, I’ll Write, But

            Naturally, I can take precautions when I eventually do write about student teaching. For example if I want to mention an idea that a student said in a discussion that I thought was insightful, I will keep the student anonymous. Additionally, I won’t mention the name of the school I’m working at or the town it is in. But even still I’m going to refrain for a while to write anything specific about my immediate experiences. I don’t plan on saying anything negative, but people have a right to expect privacy, even from my small blogging audience.

Can’t Write How if I Don’t Know How

            Finally, I’m still learning. Recently, I looked up blog post ideas for teachers, but as I went through the list I could read all the articles that were listed, but I certainly didn’t feel qualified to write them. I want to learn how other teachers do guided reading and try a couple out before I write a post on “How to Conduct Guided Reading”. All I have currently are ideas of how I would like things to go. This doesn’t mean that new teachers don’t have anything to offer, but I want to have spent more than one full day in the classroom before I start throwing around ideas. While I plan on trying things in student teaching, I want to see how they go in my own classroom and then offer them to you, my blogging audience.

What I can Write

I’ll probably write reflections of my student teaching experience that will go up before the semester is over. However, as I mentioned, due to privacy reasons and the fact that I’m going to be even extra careful, they won’t be very situation specific. So it will probably be a coupe of weeks till you can expect some reflections. I need time for my brain to marinade in my experiences and abstract takeaways from the actual situations. Then I can share those takeaways with you. But I predict after a week or two that I will have enough general ideas about student teaching that I can articulate a couple of thoughts and convey them to you. Maybe one post will be “What college didn’t prepare for the classroom” or something like that. Of course, I’m still going to be posting during this time. I’m still trying to write 20 minutes per day. It just won’t be about student teaching.

What I will Eventually Do

I anticipate wanting to write about student’s freewrites. I’m definitely looking forward to reading them and if they’re a quarter as interesting as I think they will be, I will probably be bursting at the seams. As I’ve mentioned before, I love hearing what other people think, particularly about books. After my 15 weeks of student teaching are up, I will probably feel freer to write about student teaching, still keeping students anonymous, but I won’t need to be as overly cautious. Maybe I’ll do a post on the differences I noticed between honors and academic discussions of the short stories we will be doing. I’m going to be learning so much I plan on keeping notes on all the post ideas I come up with during these 15 weeks.

Let me Know!

What posts would you like to read about student teaching eventually?

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Image Credit: "Teaching" by University of Wolverhampton