Rebecca Liddle—Blog 4: The Little Things

The experience I am having at St. Edmund’s is one that I will carry with me throughout my teaching career. Full disclosure, I was terrified for this semester. I realized this was my last semester before student teaching—before adulthood. Not only that, but I felt far from prepared to be in charge of a classroom. There were so many little things I didn’t know about teaching that I felt I should have known at this point. Not only that, but I switched to education in the beginning of 2020 so I had not been in a classroom at all until this year. All in all, I felt that I was horribly unqualified to be a teacher.
That all changed with this experience. My mentor teacher has provided me with countless tools and resources to succeed in my first year of teaching. She has stacks of teaching books waiting for me to read, she has helped me build an Amazon wishlist with everything from fidget toys to activism t-shirt’s, given me Facebook teaching groups to share ideas globally, she has allowed me to check in on student’s progress and so much more. Her books highlight teaching reading and writing lessons (with example lessons included), how to choose what is most important to teach in only 180 days, and classroom management techniques. She highlighted the importance of having a closet full of activist t-shirt’s/sweatshirts to wear on dress-down days to “always send an inspiring message”. She has taught me how to get over the fear of simply being awkward around students and walk around the classroom to check progress. My mentor teacher has a passion for teaching that she is patiently sharing with me and I am truly inspired to say the least. The experience of being in someone’s classroom who is more than willing to talk through the minute details of a functioning classroom has been influential to say the least. I am thankful for this internship that gives me an insight to teaching in a way my field placement (or maybe even student teaching) would not.

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