A Student Teacher's Journal

Mr. Hawkey plunged into student teaching with great confidence in his own abilities. But as his three-month stint progressed, he came to realize that he could not continue to rely on his old ways of thinking and functioning if he was going to survive the vicissitudes of life in a high school. THE PRINCIPAL of Millwood High School(1) looks me in the eye. Nothing ... nothing you have done so far in your life, he says, will have prepared you for this! With those fateful words, we shake hands, formalizing the end of a successful interview. My three-month career as a student teacher of social studies and art is about to begin. The First Week On Monday, January 25, I sign in at 7:50 a.m. (with 10 minutes to spare) and hang around the office reading notices, examining the Xerox machine, and wondering what to do next. Margaret, chair of the Social Studies Department, bustles in laden with books and papers to tell me that my cooperating teacher isn't in today and that I should accompany her to her office for a briefing. A little later, I join Margaret on hall monitor duty, and for the next 41 minutes I sink into information overload as Margaret lists for me the teachers in her department, their class schedules, their backgrounds, their problems, her problems, the problems with kids today, the problems with the school, and my own probable problems. She shows me the way to the guidance room, the library, the music room, the Head Start room, the faculty lounge, and the art room. She informs me that the student population is largely Latino and African American; most of the remainder come from a blue-collar Italian American community. I also glean a good bit of implicit information from Margaret's facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language --especially in the presence of the who happens to walk by post at that moment. Margaret alludes to him as our esteemed principal, but he seems smaller than I remembered and somehow diminished out here in the vastness of the empty hall. It doesn't help that one flap of his vest is inadvertently tucked up in the neighborhood of his armpit. I have a vision of him going through the day unaware of his sartorial gaffe, the butt of jokes from teachers and students alike. I want to tell him about the vest or yank it down, but of course I can't. Left to my own devices, I visit the faculty lounge. Four or five teachers are there --some complaining, others discussing their students and their schedules. I remember the words of one of my professors: |The faculty lounge can be a terrific source of behind-the-scenes information. Keep your ears open and your mouth closed. I sit down on a battered couch and instantly begin to lose consciousness, thanks to the steam heat and the lack of oxygen. Margaret comes in and informs me that I am going to proctor a final exam in U.S. history tomorrow from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in Room 105. Pick up the exams from the main office at a quarter of, she says, and walks out. Later I talk to the teacher whose exam I'm supposed to proctor. He is surprised and angry when he discovers that I have been assigned the job--not at me, but at the administration, which, he feels, is trying to save a buck by having me fill in for a substitute. We'll see about this, he says, and stalks off. Later, he tells me that he complained to the assistant principal and to the head of the teacher union and that I am thus off the hook. School politics in action! First thing on Tuesday morning I look for James, my cooperating teacher. I find him in his homeroom. He is in his mid-thirties, well-built, and he sports a tattoo on one arm and an ample moustache. He is all business. He gives me some battered textbooks and tells me to observe his first-period U.S. history class so that I can teach the same content to his eighth-period class. I am also to teach a course titled Everyday Law during ninth period. …