Do You Remember What it Was Like?

My student teacher taught her first real lesson on Thursday and I just wanted to hug her afterwards. She was so nervous and scattered that it became painful to watch. Her lesson plan was great, the implementation, not that great...

Her lesson: A Balanced Thanksgiving Meal
She began with a discussion of the foods we traditionally eat for Thanksgiving and made a list on the board of the students' responses... so far so good... then she introduced the food pyramid and then asked the students to categorize the traditional Thanksgiving foods into the different food groups...so smart I thought... Then she gave each student a worksheet with a plate on it, with divisions of the different food groups on it, and she also gave them a baggie of pre-cut Thanksgiving foods and asked the students to place the foods in the correct section of the plate. While they were doing this, she called them over to the board to ask them individually what their favorite Thanksgiving food was and she and the students created a Our Favorite Thanksgiving Food Graph. The whole lesson took about 40 minutes. Fabulous!!! She included so many objectives, integrated different subjects, great PLAN!

Watching her put this plan into action reminded me of what it felt like to be a brand new teacher and I realized just how much I do that I just don't even think about doing any more... like student proximity, smooth transitioning, using student vocabulary, having a visual for every little thing, anticipating bumps in the road, having a plan of action for T. (the rolling pin) ...all these things that you can't learn by receiving your Elementary Education degree. The things you learn by doing. What was hard for me, was watching her go through the lesson and see how personally she was taking it. Teaching is such a hard thing because so much of yourself goes into the job. In the beginning it is so hard to distance yourself from your job and to realize you're not a bad teacher when things don't go as planned. I just feel for her... I don't know when I began to be able to think on my feet and trust my teacher intuition, but I do know it happens somewhere along the line. I just hope she continues on and doesn't let her student teaching experience discourage her. She's going to be a fantastic teacher.