Summer School '06

This year, Summer School has been going extremely well—much better than it went when I was a first year. I remember being grouped with Anderson, Joel, and Dave Mo last year. Our first experience was totally unsupervised. It went remarkably well, considering: discipline wasn’t a major problem, and we did have each other for support, but the teacher who we were assigned to, Ms. Brownlee, couldn’t have cared less. She had broken her arm somehow and had definitely decided that we were an opportunity to make her life as easy as possible. She took all of the smart kids (maybe 10) and gave us everybody else. We didn’t have anybody there to observe us or to show us the ropes. Luckily, we were a smart, ambitious group of young people, and we made it work. But the advice we gave each other was totally off base. We had many ideas that seemed good, but, if we had been more experienced, we would have executed totally differently. For example, we decided to break into small groups and divide up into different classrooms. Since this meant a smaller number of students, we didn’t get a chance to practice classroom management skills. It’s just not that challenging to control 10 kids. We were pretty good with the lesson-planning, but that was about it. The boys told me I was too much of a disciplinarian, too “mean,” “scary,” and “strict,” and that I should smile more. I in turn undermined Joel’s Malcolm X lesson by contradicting him in front of students, an action that was totally inappropriate and uncalled for. Nobody was there to give us the advice we needed, and so we didn’t know what our mistakes were and how to correct them. We just had an idea that things weren’t going as smoothly as we wanted them to.
Obviously everything worked out and the story has a happy ending. We all learned from trial and error, and I’m sure we’ve all become better teachers since then, especially as far as classroom management techniques are concerned.
There will always be people who have to find things out for themselves, people who learn best from trial and error. Maybe I’m one of them. But there are many first years whose teaching has benefited greatly from the advice of their slightly older, slightly wiser mentors. I am grateful to hav3e the opportunity to save any first year teacher any trouble. I hope that many are able to avoid the pitfalls that we came across when we entered the school year. Overall, I have really enjoyed the chance to be together, to spend this time forming a supportive network of dedicated individuals. Here’s to turning Teacher Corps into the community it always ought to have been.