This semester provided me with my first student practicum experience. Me and one other girl in my ArtEd208 class - Lindsey - were partners over at a middle/high school about an hour away. The first day I was there, I felt pretty unsure. I didn't know anything about the teacher we were partnering with, but thankfully I knew the school from music and sporting events. That provided me some comfort.
When I met my cooperating teacher, my initial reaction was dread. He reminded me of my old band teacher - quiet, little awkward, but somehow having immediate respect from his students. There wasn't a lot of obvious positivity/pleasantness when I met him, and I worried that would make me uncomfortable and feel inadequate. Luckily enough, Mr. B kind of address it by himself. He called himself not a Type-A personality and isn't going to be smiling and outgoing all day every day. But I shouldn't take any offense. This was one of my biggest "problems" that I ran into my practicum because my biggest fear was that my cooperating teacher and I would not get along. Not the case at all. Despite us having completely different personalities, I felt I could talk to him and go to him for advice and be met with reciprocated respect.
The rest of the experience was also incredibly eye-opening. I taught a week long lesson with Lindsey, and I had many valuable lessons from it. The first day, we had struggled with time and gave our students a little too much in some areas, and so they got a little squirrel-y. That was eye-opening that even when we plan activities out for certain amounts of time, sometimes students don't need as much time as we give them.
My third lesson I learned was about the connections with the students. How I learned this was from a mistake on my part. I didn't know all the names of the students, instead, I was participating in a "no-hands" calling on method and picking three or four names to specifically call on students and in the process, know their names. I had read the seating chart wrong one day, and thought one of my students was called *Brian. His name, in fact, was *Brice. Easy mistake because of chicken scrawl. I was calling on students by their name, and then he raised his hand. I hadn't known the name, so I said, "Yes, you."
The next day, he totally called me on it before the start of class. We had a good laugh, and I proceeded to call him *Brian. I thought I was burning down bridges with this student because of my continuous errors, but he turned out to be a very enthusiastic student who both respected and enjoyed cracking jokes with me. I got to know all the students on some more personal levels. Such as, I could tell that *Alicia was a perfectionist and did not do well under time constraints. *John was a stubborn student and did not like being told how to do something, so you'd need to phrase your suggestions in ways that led him to the conclusion by himself. *Lily was a quieter student, but showed that she has a deeper understander of people through her paragraph describing why she chose the person she did for the portrait.
The last day of my teaching, I felt a mixture of pride and sadness. Pride because I had succeed at my first long term teaching moment, and sadness because I felt responsible for these children and knew that I'd probably never see them again.
The entire practicum experience taught me many things. Not only did it prepare me for edTPA and the video recording (what I had was absolute garbage), but I learned so much in regards to student interaction with classroom related and not classroom related subjects. I also observed many interesting moments and instructional skills from Mr. B that I want to carry with me in my own classroom some day. I love his idea of giving each student an art kit that they are responsible for the entire year and need to replace anything that goes missing. I love how he creates his seating charts - allowing students to write two people they'd like to sit by and one person they'd not like to sit by on a card that only he sees. I appreciated how he goes above and beyond with students he might not even have in his class to work with their parents and get these students back on track. This first experience was wonderful, and it truly reinforced my wanting to become an art teacher. Yes, there were hard times, but each of these hard times help me grow to become the amazing art teacher that I want to be.
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