As many times as I have read this text I keep coming back to the same problem in my head. Ok, well, there are many, but the one that gets me seems to be the reality of teaching to teach...or to do the thing. How do we prep to do a thing, anything? I keep going back to my grad school and how we are eased into teaching like an old man into a hot bath...slow and painful. I feel in all the time I was teaching or being taught to teach,I always felt like I had my head up my ass.I never really knew what it was they were trying to convey. Maybe it was all the NCLB bullshit that irked me, or maybe it was that I was sacred, but as I read Lave and Wenger’s Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation I kept seeing how it was when I was going through school. Most notably the Butcher apprentice.
When being taught how to teach they say a lot of things that really mean nothing to you at first because you have yet to be in the classroom. You take tests and you pass the but the actual teaching doesn’t take place until later...or maybe I should say “too late”. When co-teaching (or interning, it really varied on the teacher you were observing) it was then that you wished someone was whispering in your ear all the things you wish you had learned in school months before. It was like walking back into the butcher room, them handing you a slab of raw beef and saying, “Have at it”. Have at what?! I could end up making a serious mistake...killing myself or others if I don’t lose a limb in the process.
That’s kind of how it feels when thrown into the pit of teaching. The savages will rip you alive. I have no idea how I survived my first year of subbing when I didn’t have an ounce of experience under my belt. Just tossed in the meat room and told to just do it. So I did and it was amazing. All the tests and exams in the world will never really prepare you for it...the feelings, the anxiety. None of it. I think before you can teach you should be given a few months of subbing hours first to really see what it is like in the classroom. Then when you have survived and found a new-found appreciation, then you can go towards getting your credentials and then all of a sudden everything will make sense and you will know what you know you will need to know, you know?
Maybe this isn’t fully an indepth analysis of what we read, I am not sure exactly what it is I am supposed to do other than apply what I have learned to what I have learned. I guess for me, this class is to help me understand more of why we are set up the way we are and maybe help me to see what I can do to help to make it better. I mean, what can I really do but I think, based on my experience as a learner and an educator, I think that there is a lot that can be done to prepare those who are to be in the classroom to be better in the classroom.
Also, my other blog was deleted, to my dismay, so my indepthness has been somewhat crushed. I do plan on having a much better follow up to this in my next blog...any maybe something more witty and worth reading