I've decided that teaching is lot like bungee jumping.
As this semester is winding to a close, it's been great to look back and see all that I've accomplished so far. I've explored classroom managament theorists from B.F. Skinner to Alfie Khon to everywhere in between. I've created high-quality, peer-reviewed asseesment questions for diverse standards and adjusted them to make them more equitable and accessible to English Language Learners. I've learned about school governance, educational policy, and the nitty-gritty stuff of being a teacher. I've spent hours crash-coursing everything special education, from IEPs, FAPE, IDEA, and several other acryonyms.
Now, just a month or two away from my first practicum, I feel as if I am about to go bungee-jumping off into a deep abyss.
Part of me knows that bungee jumping is a safe endevour. All the training I've done the past 2 1/2 years will act as a safety cord to prevent my certain demise. Master teachers, professors, and peers will be their watching to ensure that I don't fail. But I'm still the one who has to make the jump, alone, into the deep dark abyss where all my teacher idealism, passion, and planning meets the real world. And it's terrifying.
What if my bungee cord snaps? What if a decade and a half of experieince in the public school system has not adequately for what school is like now, in a *hopefully* post-pandemic world? What if my management plan is a flop, what if all my progressive teaching techniques get thrown out the window and I end up using jolly ranchers as open bribery to keep children on task for 3 minutes chunks of time?
It could happen. Probably won't, but it could.
What I've begun to realize, however, is that feeling of complete, incomprehensible, terrifying uncertainity- that feeling of teetering on the cusp of either greatness or failure- is a feeling that most teachers, or, at least, the BEST teachers, experience daily.
The best teachers are incredibly confident, but they never assume competence. The best teachers know they are well educated, but they also know they are not experts. The best teachers know what works well in their classroom, but they aren't afraid to try something new. In short, the best teachers aren't teachers at all: they are really students, eternal students who are wholeheartedly and completely committed to the excrutiating process of learning something new every day.
You can see examples of this learning process across the globe. It's manifest in the way that teachers in 2020 have spent hours researching edtech tools and online best practices. It's the reason why 30-year experienced teachers still attend professional development conferences with gusto every year. It's why educators download duolingo to attempt to learn a few words of Arabic for the new student in their classroom. Examples of these kinds of teachers are everywhere.
So, in this, my first attempt to bungee jump to... success? failure? the best job ever? I remember that I stand with some of the best educators of the world in my leap. Educators who, to the astonishment of their friends and family, find joy in the exhilirating, terrifying, fast-paced, demanding, sometimes even dangerous, job of teaching. Educators who assume the aura of expertise, yet work with the humility and energy of a novice. Educators who make a difference in the lives of their students
I can't wait to make the leap.
