Entry No. 5 3/22/21 #setbacks

Teaching is rewarding in so many ways; connecting with students, sharing my passion for art with them, and helping them explore their ideas. However, teaching can also be difficult and have its setbacks. While I was teaching in a middle school, there were so many moments I treasure because I connected with my students, but I also treasure the moments when I had setbacks. There were times when my lesson plans did not reach the students or where I was not sure what to say when they had questions. Those moments were stressful and sometimes awkward, but I treasure them because I grew from them. When my lesson plans did not work out for the first class of the day, I had to think of how to revise them to be more engaging and easier to understand. When students had questions that I did not know how to answer, we would explore the answers together or I would ask someone else. During my year teaching I grew as an educator, but I grew from the difficult moments.

In my piece this week, it got slightly destroyed by my cat. He likes to play with anything that has strings, and while I was at work one day, he tore down a big part of the tea bags and chewed them up. At first, I was really upset with him because I have worked for weeks on this project now. But then I realized that this is now part of the art piece. I have experienced a setback with it, but now is the time to grow from that and work the setback into the art. No piece is going to be perfect through the entire process or even at the end result. This is something to teach students, too. Their pieces will experience setbacks and they will make mistakes, and I will need to teach them how to grow from these mistakes.

When Abby and I did our lesson plan, our first day was stressful and awkward because we got behind schedule and skipped some of the important parts of our explanations. This confused our peers and made things more complicated. However, we tried to revise our lesson plan during that day and revised even more for our second day which turned out to be more successful than the first day.

In the future, I will not be a perfect teacher. Such a thing does not exist. One of the reasons I am pursuing a master’s degree in education is to set myself up for success as a teacher, and by extension, my students. I am giving myself a solid foundation to draw from in times of uncertainty. But these moments will happen, and I need to know how to think on my feet and revise to be the best teacher I can be for my students.