A Hybrid

What is a teacher?

You're a deliverer of knowledge, role model, secret-keeper, friend, the bad cop, the good cop, the damn referee. It's all even weirder to manage when you're not a "real" teacher. That's what I am, a half teacher, I am a Student Teacher.

Student Teacher: a hybrid, battle-weary creature, part college student, part educational professional and not fully at home in either world, classroom or campus. They exist in limbo/training for a year before either morphing into a full teacher or reverting to a gelatinous unemployed state.

Sometimes at Lou's or over a hand of cards, or when I have my face buried in some type of soft furniture, someone will ask "what happened at school today?" And my brain plays my day back at x10 speed and I'm left with a few seconds to start articulating a response before my thinking pause lapses into the 'awkward silence zone' after which no answer said is a good one.

Its not that my day is particularly difficult or full of confidentiality, its just like for 8-9 hours a day I participate in a strange world with it's own rules: a middle school. I like that 11, 12, and 13 year olds are removed from other age groups to be educated. We didn't lump the pre-teens in with the elementary younglings, or the fearsome high schoolers. Middle schoolers aren't babies and they aren't young adults- they're literally in the middle (hence the creative moniker 'middle schoolers').

In case you've forgotten your own pre-teen years, I'll refresh your memory of the middle school experience in two words: Awkward. Angst. Student teaching is mostly training to become some sort of circus ringmaster controlling your classroom of hormonal lions and tigers.

Every day has its own little incidents that make the time go by. My 8th period class kicked off with the charming moment of one of my male students racking himself on purpose. The reason he moaned out as he rolled on our industrial carpeting clutching himself: "Jose dared me too." I asked him if he wanted to go to the nurse and he replied, "Nah Miss, I don't want my homies to see me." I think to myself that he doesn't seem to mind the 32 peers currently laughing their heads off at him in the classroom. So I sort of propped my little daredevil up in his chair and eventually his face got less red and he unclamped one hand from his crouch long enough to start taking notes.

So you see, how do I explain that when someone asks me about my day? "Oh, I had a kid punch himself in the nards because his friend said he wouldn't." ....I guess that's how I tell people! This type of behavior is not unusual for my 7th graders; in fact today was sadly not even the first time there's been a self-inflicted racking my class. I guess 12 year olds are creatures of habit. They make me laugh regardless.

I'm hoping this blog will be a fun way to document this really unique time in my life. I feel like my job definitely provides my with an abundance of stories that everyone can connect too, because honestly, we've all been 12 once. So if the awkward angst makes you laugh, cringe, shudder or I don't know- gag or just dry heave... at least you're on the journey with me.