teachers, I need your student teacher stories

either when you were a student teacher or when you had one in your class. My experience is not going so well. The kids are great, but my supervising teacher is a control freak and she contradicts herself all the time. It is making me paranoid.

So tell me you had a bad experience and it didn't ruin everything for you.

:hi:

although in my old school I had a couple of mentors of sorts, some great and some less so, but I've never had any from whom I couldn't learn something. Take what works via your best lights and go on.

they have received a grant that obligates them to teach a 90 minute langauage block in a very proscribed manner. I know for a fact that I am doing as well managing this as several of the teachers.

It's overwhelming her. 2nd grade class, half the students are ESL (english as 2nd language), some of them special ed, some of them still at the pre-primer level (!!!), constant chaos, with ESL and special ed students arriving or leaving for separate instruction every few minutes. The supervising teacher is hanging on by her findernails and trying to do what she can. There is no way on earth this school can meet it's requirements under NCLB, now or ever. My girlfriend is freaking.

At least it's only a temporary situation. Once you get into your own classroom, you'll have some room to breathe. I recommend leaning on your significant other and daily footrubs/backrubs. Get all that stress out of the system each evening and recharge.

she will be fine. I am sure it must be better to have difficult students than a difficult teacher.
Tell her I wish her luck.

ask for guidance (Could you help me with this lesson plan? What do you think? Should I try something different next time?).
compliment her: "Some of the kids say you're really cool."
Tell 4 faculty members how helpful she is (trust me; it wll get back to her!)

that A in student teaching s critical if you expect to get hired! i had a great experience, and i made sure all of my student teachers also had great experiences, but i had friends who never got to teach because of insane and/or just plain mean supervising teachers.

I will do that.
It is not getting the A that is freaking me out. I have taken over the whole day this past week and she is micro-managing everything out of my mouth. She will not leave the room and is hyper-critical. I have asked her advice and she has given me some good advice. That is not a problem, though I don't agree with her on many things, I am doing it her way.

on your choice of a noble profession. Sometimes teachers, even experienced ones, are not totally comfortable when being observed by another adult; that might explain the quirky behavior. Have you had this assignment for awhile? I predict it will go better when the two of you are better acquainted. I've had several student teachers, and the qualities I have most appreciated are enthusiasm and an extra effort to be helpful--you have probably noticed how overburdened teachers are! To echo the observations of a previous poster, you can learn a lot from any teacher (even if it's how not to do something). My own student teaching experience was positive, except for the fact that I had requested second grade and ended up with fifth! Is your field elementary or secondary? Good luck!


Edited for typo.

my experience last 7 weeks and is in first grade. Next semester I will have 6th. I hope the 2nd goes better than the first.

She has had several student teachers and absolutely loves having them. I recall she had only one who was lazy and didn't really seem interesting. Last year she had her best, a young man about thirty who had a calling to leave his profession and teach. He was wonderful with the high school students. She teaches in an urban school. She bailed him out of jail one weekend, over a very unfortunate DWI, and stood by him. She found out that he couldn't get his teaching certification with a pending charge, but could after the case was closed, whether he was found guilty or not. He had had a couple of beers and involved in a minor accident that was not his fault. The case was not heard in time for him to be find a job for the new school year, so she helped him stay at the top of the substitute list during the process. He is so grateful and inspired that his "mentor" would stand by him through such an awful situation. Just this last week she had a new student teacher who had been kicked out of the program because her "mentor" said she had anger management problems. The college sent her to my daughter after the student won an appeal, stating that if anyone could straighten her our, my daughter could. The student's story is that the mentor reprimanded her constantly in front of the students. My daughter checked this out with other teachers at the school where she was removed and they voiced for the student. My daughter's theory is that after a very short initiation, the student teacher should be left alone with the students, write their own lesson plans, with her close by, but not in the room except for one day a week. If she stays in the room, the students will not look to the student teacher for guidance and the student teacher will never learn to control the classroom. My daughter is there for guidance. She role models initially, but then it's up to the student teacher. This has been very successful for her and she has a great reputation for guiding, encouraging and supporting these students.

I wish you had an opportunity like this, but maybe when it is all said and done, you will have the opportunity to be a great mentor to someone else.

I would love it if the teacher left me alone. As it is, she is constantly stepping in and interupting my lessons with criticism. Some of it is valid, some of it is basically petty and based on the fact that I am not her clone.
She said she wants me to be more assertive but won't stop managing the classroom for a minute so that I can do so.

instead we put right in the classroom so I can't directly help you there. But I will say this. In addition to the good advice on sucking up you got I would also try to find her last student teacher and see what advice that person could give (assuming it wasn't a huge amount of time since that person had a student teacher). Good luck.

it happens.

It may not help in your situation, but I found it helped me to keep a few thoughts foremost in my mind while teaching.

1) I had access to certain knowledge.

2) The student's, for the most part, did not already have that information at their fingertips.

2) The single most important thing going on in the class room was the exchange of that information and my greatest responsibility was in figuring out how to express that information in a way that made sense to each and every one of the students.

I would have stood on my head and recited the finer details of biochemical techniques in latin if it would have helped the kids understand the material any better.

Forget the supervisor, focus on the kids. Make time to deal with each of the students individually to make sure they're grasping the material they need to understand. You'll know if they don't, and that gives you the chance to figure out how to explain the material differently to meet their needs. If you do that, your kids will recognize the effort, and, at the end of the term, they (or their parents) will be saying glowing things about you.

The measure of your success is not whether or not your supervisor "likes" you. The measure of your success as a teacher is how well your students do.

Don't let a bad experience throw you off.

Am I reaching them. I think I am, I can tell by their worksheets and by their tests that I am doing fine with them.
However this woman has the power to give me a bad grade in Student teaching and that is what I am worried about.

:kick: