A Road Less Traveled?

I just finished the last chapter of John Spencer’s book A Sustainable Start and I am both inspired, comforted and terrified all at the same time!   The letter he wrote back to his new teacher self reminds me of the letter a professor had us write a short time ago to our future certified teacher selves.  By the way, it is hard to believe how close we are getting to that day – less than four months now. 

I am inspired by Spencer’s transparency in sharing all of the ups and downs of his teaching experience, comforted that he has been through so much and still loves teaching, and terrified that it will soon be me who will be worried about all the details of a new classroom (what to put on the walls, how to build classroom community, what procedures to put in place, how to develop an authentic PLC, how to differentiate lessons to challenge each student at their own level . . . the list is endless). 

Maybe his best piece of advice in this chapter is to not “forget everything you learned in college.”  Although we will not be able to apply all of the great strategies and theories we have been learning about in our certification program (at least not all at once!), keeping them in mind will help continually stretch our practice as teachers.  I hope I will continue to take risks trying new things, as we have been pushed to do in our student teaching program, even if things will often not turn out how I had planned.  I hope I will continue to be open to learning from my mistakes and that I will be able to share mistakes and successes alike transparently with other teachers so that we can help and learn from each other.  Public, vulnerable, transparent, risk-taking – that all sounds rather scary, but I hope my future new teacher self will embrace these traits and will be able to look back one day at the forks in the road we will all face as we start our careers in teaching and see that taking this road will have made all the difference.