A Realistic Teacher Preparation Program

The new school year is on my mind. As my anxiety surfaces, I remember that you can’t be taught to teach.  There’s no program to prepare you.

The two things I took away from my education program: incorporate technology in your lessons, and if someone bleeds, stay away from the blood.  Also, don’t let other kids touch it. 

After a few years in the classroom, here’re just three of the many pieces of information I’d include in any educational program in order to better prepare the future teachers of America. . . 

1.     When walking around your classroom, you will constantly step on things—pencils, erasers, pins (previously called thumb tacks), dry-erase marker caps, and a note that a student intended to pass, but either never made it to the recipient or the recipient didn’t bother to throw it out.   You will find the note especially disappointing because of all of the misspellings. 

Usually you will step on something particularly annoying when there’s some sort of major classroom ruckus of simultaneous goings-on.   A girl will be crying over girl-drama, the principal is on the P.A. and you can’t hear what he’s saying (but it sounds important), and there’s only thirty minutes left to prepare the students for a test, pass it out, and have them take it.  It’s then that you will step on gum that shouldn’t have been in the school to begin with.  As you step on it, a kid with a horrible cold and snot drippings will ask for a tissue and the school is out of them: budget cuts.  You’ll tell him to get a paper towel, but we’re out of those too.  You’re so mad about the gum that it will be really, really hard not to respond like this: “Ever hear of a little thing called a sleeve!?”

2.     Whenever an elementary school child does something wrong, it’s an accident.  In response to these accidents, you will hear yourself saying things like, “Well, Martin, I’m 42-years-old, and in my entire life, I have never ACCIDENTALLY elbowed another person in the gut.”  Or, “Well, Angela, in all my hundred years on planet earth (some of them will believe you are 100), I have never ACCIDENTALLY called another person fat.  Another favorite: “Which part was the accident?  Constructing the perfectly geometric paper airplane when you should have been working on your paragraph or throwing it clear across the room when we were lining up for recess?” (Some things never change.)

3.     Being a teacher (especially at my school) is like triaging emergencies.  As teachers, we have to figure out who’s bleeding the most, try best to address that need, and then move down the list to the student who is next in line for some sort of (usually major) intervention. 

So, not only did my teaching program not prepare me with the real goings-on of a classroom, they also delivered misinformation.  Many of these kids are, in fact, bleeding.  And I do need to get close to the blood.  As teachers, we just try to be careful. 

Would love to hear more important information for future teachers from my educator friends… What tidbits would you include in a teaching program?