student-teaching!

WARNING: THIS IS A LOOOOOOOOOONG POST, designated to the friends and family members who have been asking me about my student-teaching experience. Most of you will peek at the novel I've written below and run screaming. That's totally ok. I won't hold it against you.

Anyway, student-teaching has been, in a word, amazing.

Some people were confused about my placement, asking if I was working with children who are deaf or hard of hearing, but that doesn't happen until next semester. While I am getting a degree in deaf education, I am also getting one in early childhood education which is what my current student-teaching placement is geared toward.

I am working in a kindergarten class in a New York City Public School on the Upper West Side. The classroom is called a CTT class which stands for Cooperative Team Teaching. This means that while the class is run under the pretense of a standard mainstream class, there can be up to 40% of students with mild special needs. These students have IEPs (individualized education plans) for learning disabilities, speech and language development, or sensory/behavioral issues. As a result, there are two head teachers - one with an early childhood education degree and one with a special education degree.

The teachers are extremely different from one another. Ms. A., the general education teacher who has been teaching for 23 years, is passive, silly, and nurturing, and I'm in love with the way she talks to the students. Ms. F. is younger, sterner, and draws a hard line, but really understands the students' needs and is constantly coming up with brilliant accommodations and guides for them. Between the two of them, I really feel as if I'm getting a comprehensive experience in the classroom. It also helps that they treat me like a peer - gossiping with me during lunch, asking about my life, and sharing their lives with me but still being readily available to address my needs as a student-teacher.

In the beginning, my role was similar to that of a teacher assistant's. I helped out with things such as handing out materials, keeping the kids in line, and creating graphs and charts for certain projects. After two weeks of helping and observing, my teachers let me run the morning meeting - a time during which the students gather on the rug and we go over the date, the weather, the poem of the week, and various other things that involve the students getting a chance to practice their reading and writing with individual white boards.

Two weeks later, I also started planning one math lesson a week. This is a bit harder than running the morning meeting. For just one lesson that takes maybe fifteen or twenty minutes to execute, I have to think about what concept I want to teach, how I'm going to open and close the lesson, what I can do to make the lesson more accessible for the students with IEPs, what materials I will need, what I will say, how and when I will model the activity for them, and how we might follow-up on the lesson at a later time. Whew!

I know that there are people out there who don't work in early childhood education and assume that it is a easy job - too easy, maybe. I'm here to confirm that that is so far from the truth. It's not just about teaching kids the ABCs and 123s. Everything that comes out of an early childhood educator's mouth is meaningful - we directly and indirectly teach the students everything from the small and immediate ("You are writing your 3 backwards") to the large and abstract ("I know you think you can't do it, but if you just do the best you can it will be great.") Even if teaching was just about the ABCs and 123s, that part is hard too! Teachers have to adhere to the various types of learners and each individual's needs. They have to make sure that rowdy kids are kept in check but without drawing too much learning time away from the students who are ready to learn. They have to reiterate the simplest of concepts several times in several different ways.

Am I making this teaching thing sound exhausting? It is. But...I feel like I'm good at it. And I know that I'm enjoying it. On the days I student-teach I have to wake up at 6.30 a.m., the earliest I've ever needed to consistently wake up for something. While the waking-up part is hard, I always find myself excited to get to school and start the day. When I realized this, I realized I was doing something right.

Next semester I'll be working in a first-grade classroom at a school for the deaf. It is a TC classroom which stands for Total Communication. This means both signing and talking are used in the classroom as the students have varying needs and levels of comfort with either communication method. I was actually a student in a TC preschool back in California.

I'm excited to be working with first-graders because the emphasis in the classroom will be about learning to read and write. Attaining literacy among young students who are deaf is crucial and is a big part of why I chose this career path. Without the proper guidance, students who are deaf can fall more and more behind their hearing peers with each passing year in terms of literacy rates. I want to help play a role in reducing this statistic.

Anyway, that begins in January. For now, I'm enjoying my kindergarten classroom and all the experiences that happen in there. I actually can visualize myself running a classroom someday - something I couldn't do back in August before this all started.

my kiddos on a field trip to Central Park