Week 4 Blog.

So it's time for a real reflection. Something a little bit truer and deep.

I didn't know if I wanted to be a school teacher when I entered teacher's college. I looked at it as a year of experimentation. I'd get to taste test a variety of classroom settings all the while getting a degree at the same time. I said to myself if I get into teacher's college, great. If not? than it's not meant to be.

So I am onto my second taste test, a grade four classroom at Givens / Shaw. This in someways is the elementary school teacher holy land. You are working in a school that has access to resources with a supportive parent body. You have the beauty of Trinity-Bellwoods all around you. You have a class of grade 4s - that magic age where kids can take care of themselves but haven't developed into attitude yet. And you have an AT who is genuinely kind and seems to have a magic amount of patience for childhood misbehaviour and antics.

And the central question that I have been asking myself throughout every practicum continues to be... Does this fit? Does this fit? And the truth is, it doesn't. If I can't find resonance in a classroom where all of the externalities are seemingly ideal, than it doesn't. And the truth is I already knew it. But you question yourself. Can you try again? Can you make it fit? Can you give it another try?

But this experience, like all experience in this so called Life Class, has taught me some very profound things.

To start, to be a really good elementary school teacher - you know one that creates magic for kids lives , you really have to believe in the magic of childhood. You need to see childhood as a precious time that needs to be safeguarded. You need to see the innocence in children. You really need to get high off of seing children grow and blossom into the potential that they could be. and You need to be a person who sees children as a vehicle back to your own sense of play.

I don't think I have that. I don't really see the magic in childhood. I see small humans who don't know how to self-regulate yet. I see that aspect of themselves that is ageless. In a way that is a good thing, but it doesn't allow me that inexhaustible patience that is necessary to teach children, to be abundantly kind to children even when they are being crazy, wild mischief-wagons. And I feel like being around children takes me away from my own inner child. It makes me serious because I have to play up that disciplinarian part of myself.

I guess when you are thinking about being a teacher, you have to ask yourself what is the aspect of teaching that you get high off of. Because seriously, if you are not getting high off of some aspect of teaching, omg you are going to die. of exhaustion. And for some, like my good friend Cat Cyr - it is childhood. It is seeing children transform. And that makes you able to overlook all of the bs of teaching. For me I think it's something different. When I taught ESL to adults, something clicked. Content aside, it was teaching adults to be children again. It was teaching them to reconnect to their sense of play. and that is something that makes me high. That is something that makes me giggle in the classroom. Watching a seventy year old get jiggy with it. So i guess what I am suggesting as we close up second practicum is to ask ourselves, what is the aspect of teaching that makes you high and are you getting it here?

I learned something else at OISE lifeclass. It was never my idea to apply to teacher's college. For teaching ESL it was an idea that came from within. It sprouted like a small flame that nagged at me until I had to do it. it percolated for a while, and by the time I was teaching in the classroom I was having grinch moments every day. I could feel my heart stretching in a visceral way. I never knew I could feel that big. Teacher's college came from my dad. It was his way of taking my idea and conforming it to his beliefs about making money. 'I'm just gonna take your idea and make it a lil' more Jewified.' What he actually said was, "Hey, you're into ESL. Why don't you apply for teacher's college." So what I learned in lifeclass here was to listen to my gut more. When making big life decisions I need to start to listening to only myself for real now. It's time to cut the cord with the parents opinions and be brave enough to pursue that things that come from within. And it's hard to silence our parents' voices. But when we do actually pursue only the things that come from within, we get to have to those jobs that give us grinch moments, feeling more than we ever thought we could feel.