Reflections from my field experience

This semester as a whole, has been a crazy one. Last year when I was thinking about getting placed in my student teaching, I would have not thought that we would be in a pandemic. But that’s the thing about teaching, we have to learn to go with the flow. Education is sometimes put on a timeline and that’s the one thing that I learned we have to sometimes be able to stop and adjust before our final product can reach the end. There are many different things that will affect timelines and sometimes we just have to slow down, which is such a hard thing to do with education. But learning how to stop, slow down, and maybe even repeat a couple of steps will help us get a better product at the end than racing the whole way through it. Sometimes we just have to trust the process and let it work its course.

The most important thing I learned is that the student’s well being comes first. We sometimes forget that students have lives outside of school and the classroom, but we come to find out a lot of things about them will affect their progress in school. I actually did not get to be in the classroom up until this last and final week of school. But now being in the classroom, students have opened up to me and it makes me think of why they wouldn’t participate or really be involved in class. Although students don’t really think about who they trust, they really put a lot of trust in teachers. I got a glimpse of some student live’s when I would do assignments and would ask them how their day was. Some students would open up and some would just say they were okay. But some students on the first day back to school really opened up to me about how their home lives were and how school makes them feel safe. This was a small glimpse into seeing that to some students, school is a safe place/haven they can escape to. This was important for me to see because wherever I get a position, I want my own students to feel safe and that they can come to me if they need to talk. It really showed to me the importance of a safe space over content. Content won’t matter if students do not feel like they can put trust into you.

Why does it all matter? Students are the reason it matters. Students depend a lot on us as teachers. Students still trust that the education system isn’t going to fail them so they place a lot of trust on teachers. Some students have lost hope on the education system and you will most definitely see it in your classroom.But it’s important to keep reminding students that not everyone's the same and that they can continuously trust you.