Blog Assignment 9

What I learned This Year

In this post Mr. McClung gives some pretty good advice for starting out as a teacher. He talks through many of the feelings that will experienced and things that can be prepared for and those that can't always be helped. In some ways it's a condensed version of everything we talk about in this class.


Be ready to change and adapt, be prepared to communicate with students and colleagues alike, branch out and think big but never let a little bump get you down too much.
He reminds us that it's not about us but the students which frankly is something I already have to keep telling myself and occasionally others. His last lesson is the same thing my dad and mom never stop telling me; never stop learning. This is always my favorite advice in any situation. We never get to old learn something new, a skill or even just a different way of doing things we have done for years.

This advice is concise simple and at the same time terribly difficult to keep in your head. We're preparing to be teachers and it's a frightening and exciting idea that someday I'm going to have my own classroom. I'm going to be giving assignments, grading, papers, the works. It's hard to imagine what it will be like, what my students will be like, what school I'll be teaching at, what technologies will be available, and what the world itself will like. All I can hope to do is prepare myself as best I can now to be flexible enough to work with what I have but not so flexible that my students are cheated by it. Hopefully I can find that sweet spot between the cool hip teacher and the rigid drill instructor type. No student is exactly the same and the same can be said as teachers. We won't all have the same experiences and while our advice can help others we will have have different mixes of students with different mixes of problems. We'll have to come up with the solutions on our own with some assistance from our PLNs and isn't that one of the reasons we're developing them after all.