Student Teaching: The Students

Looking back, I cannot believe that I did not see the summoning tsunami of disrespect that was heading my way as a student-teacher. Students as a rule do not think that they have to listen to a substitute teacher, and a student-teacher is even lower on the totem pole than that. First year teachers do not have as much trouble, provided that they take over the class at the very beginning, that they are the first person that the students meet when they come into the classroom.

I had justly yet naively assumed that students would demonstrate respect to a teacher who was visiting the class for the semester.

I even observed the mentor teacher who I was going to replace about one week before I stepped into the class.

The students were a gregarious group, although I was surprised that students would talk and make jokes while he was handing out a test.

Just before they took the test for that day, I was ushered in to meet and greet with the students.

They wanted to know a little bit about me. I told that I went to Torrance High School, one of the rival schools in the area. They all booed, in jest, of course, although in the long-term view I could swear that they were already setting the seeds of dissent against me.

I told  that I had served as an intern for the public defender's office in Orange County. I had also spent some time working with autistic students in County classrooms.

They wanted to know things like, "Will you tell jokes" and other impertinent ephemera -- at least, that's how I saw it.

The student aid, a senior who had taken the class with my mentor-teacher to be, commented that I seemed like a guy who knew what he was doing.

In hindsight, I was clueless walking in, and nearly lost my mind being shown the door out.

From the first day of the semester -- in itself an unconscionable mistake, since the mentor teacher should never have let me start out teaching the class right away but wait a week or two before jumping in -- I was having problems.

I was a confrontational type then, and still am. I did not have that "teacher" element, according to my mentor teacher. Whatever that "it" factor was, I did not have it. I have never set off so many students as I did during those six weeks. I do not regret that they let me go -- I was not ready to be a teacher, I was not the type who wanted to "work with" students, which in large part means accepting sub-standard work from uninterested studenst and letting them pass on.