Teacher for a Day
Stacy Marshall
I remember those glory days in high school where everyone believes life couldn’t get better, and that they couldn’t get any cooler. I also remember thinking, “Man I would hate to be a teacher!” but then again here I am going to school to become a high school teacher. It seems strange to me to be going back to school and looking at those high school kids thinking, “I sure hope I wasn’t this bad.” This is just the beginning of my day in the life of a high school teacher.
I chose to do my service-learning project on student teaching at Beaver High School, partly because it would help in my career later on in life, but also because I wanted to be apart of the lives of those high school kids. I know when I was in high school I was not the biggest fan of history, so I wanted these kids to get a spark of interest in history from someone who is a little closer to their age and understands them better as people not just students. These kids were my intended audience, but it also benefited the teacher, who pretty much just listened to me, as well as myself. I hoped that by trying to teach these kids a little about history, they would get some kind of interest in it before it was too late.
I was extremely nervous to talk to our principal, Mr. Henry at Beaver High School. I honestly do not know why because he is the nicest guy around, but I just felt incapable of becoming a good enough teacher for these kids. When I finally got the guts to call him, he was more than willing to help out. He put me through to the History teacher at Beaver, Jon Marshall, and we made plans for me to come and teach. I drove to Beaver and picked up the books necessary to teach his classes. I would be teaching World History to the tenth graders and U.S. History to eighth graders. This seemed simple enough for me to go through the intended subjects necessary for the day I would teach. I taught the tenth graders about the Cold War and the events that led to it, and I taught the eighth graders about the Revolutionary War. These were simple enough subjects especially since we just learned about the Revolutionary War in History 2700. I got the materials on Friday, and I was going to teach the following Tuesday. So I had all weekend to work on the subjects intended. I used my old history books from my old history classes as well as the dictionary (I was at home so I did not have the internet at my house to use) to study up on the materials I needed to be able to teach the class. So after a weekend of preparing I felt okay about teaching on Tuesday. To tell the truth I was relieved to get it over with because I was nervous about teaching ever since I decided what I would do for this service-learning project.
The night before I was to teach I was pouring over my material and making little notes, so I would be prepared and not forget important facts. The whole time I was doing this I was nervous and making myself sick. I couldn’t handle it because I had no idea what to expect. So as I got ready for bed I just hoped and prayed that I would be able to get through it all right, but I could not sleep because of all the pressure I felt. So when it came time to get up and get ready to go to Beaver I was a bit tired and quite sick to my stomach. So I put on a skirt, because I wanted to look nice and a little professional, and headed off to Beaver from Minersville—where I am from. When I arrived in Beaver I had about five minutes before class started to prepare myself for what was about to take place. I was to teach the tenth graders about the Cold War 1st and 2nd periods, and the eighth graders the Revolutionary War 5th and 6th periods. After the first period was over I began to relax and get into more of a rhythm, but I was just getting through my lessons too fast. The problem with that was the students because they just sat there and stared at me and would not ask questions, so I just let them work on their questions Coach Marshall assigned them. After the second period I had a two hour break to prepare my other lessons a bit better. Coach Marshall told me to just relax and that I was doing fine, and that the eighth graders were more willing to answer questions, so maybe I wouldn’t get through the lesson quite as quick. You see I had a specific subject with a specific starting point and ending, so I wanted to stay within this area so that the original teacher did not have to try to find where I left off. So after the first two periods I went home to prepare my other lesson and to think of what I could do to help take up time. When 5th period came back around I was a bit more prepared on what to expect from these students. My first lesson went pretty good and these kids where more willing to participate than the others. The only problem was the fact I still got done early, so while I was waiting for the bell to ring I thought of a game I could play with the next class. When I went through my last lesson I found I still had time left so I split the class in half and decided to do this little activity with these eighth graders. I had half of the class pretend they were the British and the other half were the Colonists. I wanted the British side to think of ways they would have used to defeat the Colonists, while the Colonists had to sit and wait to counteract whatever the British intended to do. These students had quite the imagination, after I told them they had to place themselves back in the late 1700’s where they couldn’t just bomb them from airplanes and such. They had quite the ideas, and some where actually pretty good like bribing the colonist leaders. To tell the truth in this little activity the British soldiers won and the Colonists lost big time.