It's funny what endings do to you, even if you see them coming. Friday is my last day of my student teaching placement, and I am stuck between extremes of feeling. Between being relieved that the end of this insane year is in sight and being incredibly sad because I will miss students and my CMTs. Between needing a mental break from the madness and realizing that I am meant to be in teaching, if only because I endured all manner of madness for it and still loved the experience.
It feels like now is *actually* the time for reflection, instead of a week ago with the letter, but whatever. I am planning on doing a couple of things to help myself along the road of reflection on my own time. Probably the biggest of all is creating a survey to give to the students I worked with, asking them to tell me what they liked, what they didn't like, what they wish I would have done, etc. I may add a fun question because I am me and I like fun.
The main purpose though is to get some honest evaluation from the people I taught, because I feel like it's as important as all the observations I had to go through with my CMTs and my supervisor. They're evaluating me from a technical, professional standpoint, which is obviously important. Especially since professionalism is sometimes still a struggle for me. But if I'm not getting through to the students, professionalism and all the other technical stuff doesn't mean a whole lot.
So I will be creating that, probably tomorrow, as I work to run through my last minute end of the semester checklist. If only it would stop growing... And also, writing better blogs in the near future, when I time to compose them. As opposed to tonight when I am rather desperate to go to sleep, and cannot fully develop the thought. I may come back to it, though. I feel like this is a pretty important one.
Until tomorrow.
Congratulation on your soon-to-be-completed student teaching! I'm glad it was positive. Teaching is a grueling profession, not for the weak-hearted.
ReplyDeleteLove,
A retired teacher.