Excellent advice - after 19 years I still meet with the teacher who hosted me during my training summer whenever I go back to NYC, and just this morning received advice and materials from a teacher who supported me at a new school in another country 8 years ago. Teaching is a profession full of people who love helping, guiding and mentoring. Build connections with your colleagues and pass on your knowledge, too.
That is so amazing to hear! 19 years and still in contact.. I really hope I'm the same with my supervising teachers (I currently get to work with two of them!). It really is a unique profession and we are very lucky to be so collaborative.
Starting my MTeach next year and super worried that I've chosen wrong, not for any tangible reasons, just my anxiety playing up but I'd love to hear about what you and other teachers you've interacted with love about teaching, your favourite memories from your pracs, the biggest lessons you've learnt and all of the things (good and bad) that you weren't expecting before you started teaching.
Hey Elyse, totally natural to feel that way. I think I was born to be a teacher and once I decided to pursue it as a career, I was confident it was right for me. With that said though, this didn’t help with the anxiety! It’s a practice which due to the unknowns will always cause at least a little anxiety (I get it still every first day back), so that’s completely natural. I’m working on a couple of videos at the moment about those things you brought up, and will strive to make them. Look out in the next couple of weeks for videos about “what university doesnt teach you about teaching” and “what I love about teaching”. Side note, I’m also going to be starting a podcast with a couple of colleagues where we discuss everything teaching, I’ll post about it when it comes out, be sure to check it out :) Thanks for commenting and best of luck in your studies! Welcome to the team :)
Definitely a valid worry, and something even experienced teachers struggle with. It's hard finding the balance between valuable learning tasks and getting through the packed curriculum. What are your content areas you are going to teach? Also about your content knowledge, that will develop over time. It's hard for beginning teachers to have a wide content knowledge, and you don't know what your going to be teaching specifically, so you can't really prepare until you get there on day 1.
