thoughts on student teaching #4

I have 2 make-up days to take care of at the Elementary I am at next week before I move on to the High School I'm assigned to. Last week was a crazy week! My cooperating teacher's daughter went in to the hospital to have her baby, so that left me in charge for the week. We were both anticipating her having to leave for 5 days, and actually this turned out to be the perfect week anyway, since I was in charge of all of the lesson planning and teaching for all of the classes all week. And I got paid for 4 1/2 days of subbing. Can't complain there.

The kids consistently grew more and more restless as the week went on and we got closer and closer to Spring Break. And the weather was changing. And the 4th graders watched "the video" (you know what I'm talkin' about). And TAKS was on Tuesday. Many ingredients to make for an interesting pot-o-kid-behavior stew. Don't think I want to dish that one up again. Seriously, it wasn't terrible, but I was more than ready for a week-long break!

One of the goals that was in our packet before teaching began was to help us student teachers decide if this career was really the one that we want to keep pursuing. After 7 weeks at the Elementary level of music teaching, I can't say I've fallen in love. I can tolerate it for longer amounts of time though. Isn't that a plus? The kids don't scare me anymore, the lesson planning doesn't haunt me any longer, but I just don't think I could do that job day after day and really enjoy it. I'm still sorting out exactly why, but maybe after I'm teaching High School for a little while I'll understand more. I do know this. Teaching takes a monstrous amount of time- outside of school. Especially teaching music to 5-6 different grades. The planning alone can eat up hours of afterschool and evening time that are reserved (in my opinion) to my family, home, and marriage. I just don't think I'm willing to sacrifice those precious hours for making cute little construction paper "crescendo" and "decrescendo" alligators (which I did last week). I realize that the first couple of years, yes, most teachers do end up working a WHOLE lot, and then the years after it's much easier to keep work at work and come home with not much to do. Maybe later I can invest. Just not now.

Oh, and kudos to working moms!