If you sat down and looked your favorite teachers in the eye, they would most likely tell you that their worst year of teaching was their first and that, of all college courses, they learned the most during their student teaching.
I frequently wonder what happened to those poor students I taught in that year and a half. They were really guinea pigs who taught me a lot more than what I taught them.
One of my student teaching placements was at a large public high school in Sioux Falls. Although I looked forward to teaching my cross-curricular class of civics, language arts, and speech, I was more than a little nervous—okay, petrified—every day to teach Students At-Risk (STAR) English 2. This class, after all, had a reputation. I was told to only get after students for the "big" swear words, and I quickly realized I could expect one-third of the class to be suspended, making it usually a class of around eight students.
These kids simply freaked me out. I had been a teacher's pet. I was the student that the teacher put in charge when she left the room. I was the one who didn't drink, didn't smoke, and didn't swear (except for that time on the bus—sorry, Mom). How was I going to identify with these kids, let alone teach them?
Things didn't start out well. My wonderful plan of teaching symbolism backfired. When I invited the kids to draw common symbols in order to open up discussion of how symbolism was used, the snickers alerted me that I was seeing drug symbols drawn on the marker board. When we had class discussion, the topic would sometimes wind its way into something classroom-inappropriate, and I didn't have the experience I needed to quell the problem quickly.
I took one day at a time and couldn't wait until the end of the semester. I had only one hurdle to jump over, and that was a classroom observation by one of my favorite English professors. She wanted to observe the STAR class.
The day before she came, I told the students that they could expect someone observing from the back of the room the next day and was peppered with questions: "Who is she?" "Is she watching us?" "Why is she watching you?" "She's your teacher?" I had the uneasy feeling that this wasn't going to end well.
The appointed time arrived, and my STAR students turned out to be star students. They raised their hands. They participated in discussions. They were polite. From the back of the classroom, my English professor beamed. At the post-observation discussion, I tried to explain to my professor that this was not normal, that some paranormal activity had obviously just happened in my classroom. She laughed and checked the pass line on the observation sheet.
The last day of my student teaching assignment, my STAR students actually gave me hugs. They taught me so much. They taught me that to teach them, they needed to see me as one of them who was on their side. When they saw me as a teacher, they didn't have a whole lot of respect for me. When they saw me as a student who had the same fears and requirements as they did, everything changed.
Sometimes when I struggle, I remember that God sent Jesus to feel all the emotional and physical pain that we sometimes have, and like my STAR students, I begin to realize that I'm not alone either—that God has been one of us and that He is on my team. After all, "If God is for us, who can be against us (Romans 8:31)?"
