Things I Wish I Knew Before Student Teaching

            I student taught in the fall this past semester and I’ve graduated now, but there are a lot of things that I wish I knew beforehand. Not that they were vital for me to know, but they certainly would have saved me some unnecessary worrying. Now I had an amazing mentor teacher and an awesome supervisor so take what I say with a grain of salt, but hopefully your mentor and supervisor will be as great as mine were.

Mentor Teachers are Awesome

            Being a mentor teacher is difficult. I didn’t understand this until the end of the semester. While I recognized that my mentor had to teach me as well as his students, I forgot that he had to intentionally hold himself back from teaching. If you get a really good mentor teacher, chances are they actually like teaching!  This means that it’s really difficult for them to just sit back and watch someone else teach their class. So don’t get discouraged if you aren’t taking over classes as quickly as you would like. This just gives you the opportunity to work on learning names as quickly as possible.

Names

            On that note learn names as quickly as possible. I am terrible with names. So I was really worried about not being able to remember my students’ names in all of my classes. Here are a couple tips that I stumbled upon. Besides taking attendance and handing out papers, which help you learn names, force yourself to repeat the names you know as much as possible. Listen to their conversations for names of students you don’t remember. The moment you remember their name you automatically have more of their attention. However, the opposite is also true; the longer it takes you to learn their name, the less they listen. But once you got a name down, you’re set, or at least I was, because you see them everyday Monday through Friday.

Lunch

            I packed a lunch in order to save money, but my main advice with lunch is to just listen to the conversation in the faculty lunchroom for at least the first day or two. This way you don’t accidentally proclaim your steadfast opinion on something only to hear two seconds later that nearly everyone in the room vehemently disagrees with you. It’s natural and a really good thing to participate in the lunch conversation. It gives you an opportunity to experience what it is like to communicate with other experienced teachers besides your mentor and it makes a great impression. But lunch conversations can quickly turn negative, which is understandable because teaching is difficult. At the same time, you don’t want to be remembered as the student teacher that was always complaining.

Relax

Relax! You’re learning. It’s ok. You’re not going to know everything your mentor does after the first week or the first five weeks or even after the fifteen weeks (in my case) are over. You’re here to get started, to build a foundation, to get your feet wet. Unless your mentor explicitly tells you, you need to improve somewhere chances are you are doing fine. If you’re really stubborn, like me, and want to worry, ask your mentor to give you some tips and then only focus on those tips and let the rest of your worries go.

Enjoy it!  

I always scoff at the notion that any time is “the best time of your life”. If the best time of your life is college or heaven forbid high school, then what have you got to look forward to for the next 60 to 80 years? That said student teaching was amazing. I definitely didn’t realize this time last semester as my stomach was churning thinking of everything that was coming, how much I would miss it once it was over. If you really want to be a teacher, unless you have a horribly organized or mentored student teaching experience, this is when you get your first taste of what your professional life is going to be like.  Plus when you graduate, you might have to wait a bit before you get your own classroom.

What about you?

I hope you have an awesome student teaching experience! Let me know how it’s going! What questions, worries, etc. do you have? For those of you done student teaching, what do you wish you would have known?  Any advice for those just starting?

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Image Credit: A picture of me student teaching taken by my supervisor.