October 9th, 2015 was the first time I'd been in an elementary school during school hours since I was an elementary student. It was the first time that I'd really tried to see the room and the process from the perspective of a teacher. It was the first time I've ever tried to be an educator to some degree in an academic setting. It was nerve racking. It was amazing.
When I stepped into the building that Friday, I didn't feel like a student teacher coming in for her first day of field placement; I felt like I was in elementary school again and today was the first day. I really didn't know what to expect; after talking with my mentor teacher on the phone a week earlier, I felt confident that I had a good mentor teacher, I was going to be in a diverse and interesting classroom, and that I would quickly become a part of the class, but I had no idea what that actually meant.
It's amazing how much you can forget in ten years about what elementary school is like, and how much of what you do remember looks completely different from the perspective of an adult. Even before the students arrived, I felt mildly overwhelmed trying to take in the classroom while also taking it apart; trying to determine why things were arranged the way they were, what the room told me about the class, identifying different tools and details that we'd discussed in lectures. With those filters on, my perception of the room's complexity increased significantly. Within minutes I could see that the class has a heavy emphasis on reading - there are shelves of books which dominate most of the accessible wall space, each child has their own bucket filled with books that they want to read during Reader's Workshop, and most of the posters on the walls described different tools for the children to use while reading and picking out books - and I could see that the layout of the room was set up to provide students with a certain degree of autonomy - everything in the room was at a height that children could interact with and reach comfortably, even the teacher's "desk." It was fun to try and guess what different areas of the room were used for and what the structure of the day would be before the class actually began.
Once the students did arrive, I found myself so distracted by just trying to observe as much as I could, that I spent most of my time jotting down notes. Well, jotting down notes and trying to learn all of the students' names. While I definitely worked to be more than just a bystander with her nose and pen buried in a notepad, there was so much going on that I hadn't seen before that everything seemed like something I should take notes on. I bounced back and forth between notes specifically about the lesson we were currently doing, to notes on the room, class, and atmosphere in general, to writing down my observations of the students when I had opportunities to work with them on different assignments.
To call the overall experience overwhelming would probably be a bit of an understatement, but at the same time, I loved every second of it. Just observing my mentor teach and picking up on the various aspects of her teaching style was interesting on its own, but adding in the ability to see how the actual children responded to it brought those observations to a whole new level. The class itself also made for a wonderful experience. As obvious as it may sound, I was excited to see how every child in the class had a distinctly unique personality. Even if it took me a while to be able to match names with faces, I had no problems remembering who each of the kids were. Trying to observe all of them and get a feel for how their minds work and what their favorite parts of the day are was an immediate reminder of why I'd been so excited to learn how to teach.
I can't wait to find my groove in the classroom, work with my mentor and the students to grow as an aspiring teacher, and see how the students grow over the course of the year.
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