I am thankful to Drs. Michelle Farrell and Jessica Alicea for taking me out to lunch. We wanted to do tea and biscuits afterwards but arrived two minutes before they closed the door and they wouldn't let us in. Ugh. Good day for tea, too.
The grading is going slow. Not everyone understands the massive identity shift of moving from students being students to students seeing themselves of designers of curriculum and lesson plans. The work overwhelms them, frustrates them, and gets them feisty, but it is a developmental process to learn the genres of teachers, schools, and states. Their are parts that need to be established in order to get one's licensing, and learning the intricacies (perhaps bureaucracies) is sometimes a big lift, especially when they see how much time and energy it takes to show how one is thinking about lesson plans. It always puts into question, "What do they think educators have been doing with and for them as students all these years?"
There's serenity in the fact that most of my colleagues across the nation understand this development, too, and simply name it as growing pains. I also see it as identity restructuring in the same way that I experienced it while doing my dissertation. How is it I taught for over a decade and never delved in the mountains of articles to reach my students? I just reached them. It's a different way of knowing and seeing the world, and being molded for success is what education is all about.
Tough love. I'm thankful for all who held the line (and bar) high for me, because it better prepared me for the work I'm doing now...not just as a K-12 educator, but as an academic doing research on teaching and literacy learning. It's all connected and I'm thinking of Kelly who used to tell me often, "If it was easy, everyone would be doing it."
Teaching is hard. Kids deserve those who have content and pedagogical knowledge. It remains an impossible job, but there's good in knowing how others have found their way. No. Stealing from teachers pay teachers, without any original thinking on your part, is not what kids deserve. Yes, there's good stuff out there, but you need to prove what you can do without going to others who have done it before you.
Fascinating, really. And I go back to my first lessons, which were #@$#, but I had to learn, too....the parts...the purposes...and a base for doing better for kids.
