1.) I am a very task-oriented person. I teach direct and to the point – I don’t add in personal narratives, I don’t check for understanding, I don’t try to change what I say – I say what needs to be written down and remembered. The students are silent during my instruction, looking at me with wide eyes (unless I don’t know what I’m talking about, then they let me know that they’re lost and it's my fault).
2.) I will need to be strong and confident as a teacher - in my interactions with students and creating my curriculum, and also with parents. There are going to be parents who make excuses for their children, who want to bash the school and its teachers, and who are going to be down right rude. I need to stand up for myself, stand up for my position as a teacher, and stand up for the public school system. And I also need people who will back me up – teachers and administrators. [I learned this from sitting in on a parent-teacher conference between the entire 6th grade core team of teachers, the 6th grade counselor, the 6th grade vice-principal, and the student with his mother.]
3.) Schools work much more smoothly when the staff work together to help the students. [Another realization I took with me after the parent-teacher conference.]
4.) I will be silenced in some ways as a teacher. [There are some things that could be said to a customer of a business that cannot be said to a student or parent of a public school, though both the business and the school are a SERVICE institution to the customer and student/parent.]
5.) I am already exhausted at the end of each day and I haven’t even started bringing assignments home for grading.
And as I sit here now reflecting over my student teaching experience (which has lasted a total of 1.5 weeks, since I am sitting at home today rather than in Mrs. Carlsen's classroom thanks to the ice storm), I think the biggest thing I feel at this moment is an affection for my students. I actually miss them today and wish I could be in class with them. I am finally learning most of their names, gaining their trust, and allowing myself to open up to them.
Even though they're 6th graders who might smell because they haven't developed a self-regulated sense of personal hygiene, or who are still completely enraptured in their own way of looking at the world (weather that be through the eyes of their sport hero, their comic book hero, or their new bff who stole their boyfriend last week), they have a sweetness about them and a hopeful imagination that still enjoys to discover the world around them. To them, the "adult world" is still new. I have not met a single 6th grader in class who thinks they have everything figured out. Even the troublemaker bully in the class, who can manipulate adults and other students to like him, still finds things we talk about in class interesting and fascinating, and he wants to share his own personal story that (most often) has very little relevance to the topic of discussion.
These students are on the tail end of their childhood. Most of them are still kids, and they hold within them that innocence and wonder and amazement that only kids can have. Most of them will begin to lose their kiddish cuteness starting in the next few months to the next year. I know this for a fact as I have seen many of Billie's 6th graders from last year (current 7th graders) stop by her room to chat with her as they pass by on the way to the gym, or the cafeteria, or the bus, and I remember them from last spring when I observed Billie's class. The current 7th grader they are today is a drastic shift from their cute, innocent, happy-go-lucky 6th grader self. Their faces have pimples, their voices have dropped, and the look in their eyes has a self-conscious glare. They have changed.
And yes I know we are all, each one of us human beings, changing all the time. Our cells are regenerating (or for some of us not), our understanding and experience is re-shaping the way we think and approach life, and we are therefore becoming a "new" person all the time. But this change from 6th to 7th grade, the change from pre-pubescent to "adult" is a unique kind of change that is irreversible.
There is an innocence and wonder to childhood that I think we all can agree upon and nostalgically reflect on, feeling a sense of loss and pain while also joy at the same time. In our American culture, childhood is valuable and precious, and we protect it (almost for too long) in our youth. But the minute our bodies change, betraying our innocence and lack of "knowing better" we begin to be treated like adults who do "know better" and therefore should act accordingly. Secrets long held back from us are thrown in our faces, and often in our American culture, we are not given any sort of coping strategy or mechanism to deal with our changes (physical, emotional, and social) in a healthy way. We become, for the first time in our lives, aware of how the people around us perceive us, and we painfully experience how it differs from the way we perceive ourselves. We become awkward-looking on the outside, and begin to feel awkward about ourselves on the inside.
And our innocence is lost.
We shift from adventure and amazement and wonder to a desperate yet kamikaze-like survival mode - survive the PE class where the "big" kid's gonna pound on me, survive the lunch room where the "pretty" girl is going to undercut my social power and status, survive the classroom where I'm going to be asked to recall all the information and skills I have been drilled on and trained to perform from elementary school. And every adult stands by and watches, not knowing how to help, offering only the advice of "this, too, shall pass."
I think one reason I find myself with such affection for my 6th graders is because I know there are only so many precious moments left with them as they are right now. Their childhood is coming to an end; they are growing up. And the world will never be the same for them.
So call me sentimental (all of my close friends will vouch that is a realistic characterization of me). I am cherishing the final moments of my students' childhoods, and I can't imagine what they're going to face in the next few months to a year from now. I hope I can somewhat prepare them for the slaughter of junior high that acts as our American rite of passage.
