I blogged a little earlier about missing the classroom management course, but then again the purpose of student teaching is to truly figure out some of that out for yourself. One thing I am missing, though, is a lost connection.
It is the connection between the knowledge I receive in the classroom by learning my content area, Language Arts, and the education courses I receive about dealing with BD students, TAG student, portfolios, and schools in general. How do I go from one to the other? The connection in the middle, how I actually teach what I know, is lost – it’s missing.
I know all these great things about poetry, English and American literature, grammar, writing, and a whole lot of other stuff that I was taught in my English courses at college. I also know all these things about how schools are structured, what BD and TAG mean (Behavioral Disorder, Talented and Gifted), and how to plan a lesson. My question, and maybe this should have been on the student teaching disclaimer form that I did not sign, is where do I connect this all? Where is the course on teaching poetry? Teaching American literature? Teaching grammar? I must missed that one. We have methods courses at Wartburg, but as a secondary education major I only took one of those. One course is not enough to cover everything that I will be teaching. Maybe that’s why we looked at the Best Practices in education, but still that does not help me out in two weeks when I have to teach poetry. I know what slanted rhyme is, I know structure, meaning, and the vocabulary to go with it, but where is the connection between that and my fifty-nine minutes in the classroom? Or am I supposed to figure that out as I go? Is that really the purpose of student teaching? Figuring out how to teach everything that I know? I guess to a degree that it is, but I would have liked to be more prepared to teach my specific content area. Help me make the connection between what I know and how I teach it.
Am I the only one experiencing the “Lost Connection?”
