Teaching today

I spent a working day teaching third grade at Emmanuel yesterday. I must admit I was rather nervous about going and teaching grade school. There are a couple of reasons for this.

First off, I have never formally taught a classroom full of 8 year-old's before. Sure I have worked with this age group before. In fact, I actually have quite a bit of experience with this age group; however, I have never had them for more than an hour or two. In addition, those two hours would always be broken into three or four segments or more, thus working well with a child's attention span.

Second, I had a rather bad experience with third grade as a child. Thus this grade does not rate on my favorites in which to experience again. At least this reason is more easily dealt with. I know well that this is irrational, and was able to overcome it with a bit of logic and reason.

Well I will be the first to admit that I had a good time teaching these 14 children (3 boys 11 girls). I walked into a teacher class that was already well behaved, and she was so organized I had little to do but follow the post-its to get done what she wanted. I taught Bible, Reading, Penmanship, Math, etc. I did have fun working with them in long division.

I did notice a few things that caused me to be thankful that I am pursuing secondary education for my teaching career. The first is the more profound, they are not able to think abstractly. I knew this going in, from my training in education from College, but it really hit home dealing with it. These children were very smart, but could only do so much with their concrete thinking. This came out most in math as they had to slowly work their way through problems, while I could actually "see" the solution without the work. I was able to successfully teach them, but I prefer to work with greater concepts that high schooler's wrestle with.

Another caution that I saw was the extreme creativity and organization that is required to work with this age group effectively. She was amazingly crafty, creative, and organized in multiple ways. This is just not a strength that I have. I can work and make myself organized so that grades and coursework can happen, but the ways that this teacher had set up to work with these children was just amazing. A little above my head.

The last caution that I saw was less profound. You can not turn your back on little kids. In elementary school, you have the children all the day long. There is no changing classes every hour, there is not opportunity for teachers who drink to much water to go to the bathroom. This was a problem yesterday.

In all I enjoyed the experience, got paid for it, and made some more connections with Christian people. My legs were sore like no other all night because I had literally been standing all day long. I am going to get back into shape to teach, or teaching is going to get me back into shape.