Attention All Upcoming Senior II Interns!

by Lindsay Brooke Whitfield (May '08 graduate)

You are just about to partake on a semester journey into another world that you have been waiting 3+ years for. As Teaching Fellows we have attended seminars, participated in committees, attended all summer Teaching Fellows events, and any other activities on campus that we have felt would help us prepare for our future. However, your clinical internship experience is something you could never be prepared enough for.

I have realized that it doesn’t matter how many speakers you hear discuss on a variety of issues that you will encounter in the classroom, how many extra trips you attend to become more culturally educated before entering the classroom, and the high grades you achieved in your general education courses. Your clinical experience will test you. The one thing that you will realize is that no one else will receive the same experience that you will. Your other friends in your major, your Teaching Fellows, or those that have come before you will all receive different experiences. Some of you may be placed in a school with a clinical teacher that you “clash” with; others will have been matched perfectly with their clinical teacher. Some of you will be placed in small rural areas where the poverty level of the students and the community is rather eye opening; others of you will be placed in high attendance level schools where the student to teacher ratio is unbelievable. Some days you will experience heart-warming feelings of compassion towards the students, and sometimes the best feeling you had that day was when you finally wrote that particular student up for ISS. The truth is, you’ve probably already heard this and what I’m saying isn’t any new news to you at all. But once you’re there, at your school, everyday, from beginning to end, you’ll finally face all of these experiences. It is when you realize that you’ve been thrown into the madness that sometimes you wonder why you wanted to be a teacher. It is also when you see a small child smile because you helped him/her with something so small to you but yet it was so difficult for them, or when your high school students hand you a prom picture with a note written on the back that says “To Ms./Mr. _________, I’m going to miss you so much next year,” that you realize how rewarded you are. These are honestly the different joys of a teacher. You never honestly know when you wake up in the morning what to expect in your school day.

You will be told plenty of times that your students cannot affect your day. It doesn’t matter how happy and energized you may be in the morning because who’s to say that every student in your class woke up feeling just as bright as you. There are seldom days in the classroom where every student is having a “great” day. But, that’s also the fun of it; the surprises that each student will throw at you. You never know how your best class will act versus your worst class on a daily basis, or how your favorite students will act versus your not as favorite students. It may be that the new topic/subject you’re introducing that day, or for me, a particular dance step that I choreographed, that you’re extremely excited about doesn’t even seem to excite or motivate your students at all. You will be disappointed some days and then rather impressed others. You will find that being a teacher starts to become a sport where you begin to learn how to predict what will happen next. And this, my friend, is why you’re a Teaching Fellow. I hope that you all enjoy your last semester of college and yet your first semester towards finally becoming the teacher you wanted to be.