By Cody Fitzgerald
Campus News
Starting out with my aspirations of being a filmmaker, comedian and author, one might argue that striving to become an English teacher is a fall from grace. Right off the bat, I disagreed with this statement, and you should too. I always knew being a teacher is one of the most honorable and great jobs a person could have, but when I did my field experience last week I got a whole new perspective.
(For confidentiality reasons, I’m going to not name the school, teachers and obviously not any students I worked with, but for arguments’ sake let’s say these kids are all in 8th grade and the teacher I worked with was named Darren Johnson.)
I spent the night before biting my nails and replying to “under no circumstances, do not talk politics with these children” texts from my friends. The next day, I arrived at Mr. Johnson’s room a little early, hoping I would be able to make a good impression and make up for the fact that I pulled up with a messy hairdo and pullover TJ Maxx sweater, and I think it did. Immediately, teachers walked up to me and shook my hand, introducing themselves with their first name, which was utterly terrifying. It wasn’t until the second period that the kids came in, though, and I finally got to go all in with my fieldwork.
After being greeted with, “damn, you’re tall,” or “are you in 9th grade,” or “woah, you’ve got clown feet,” (this kid is failing, by the way), it wasn’t long for me to realize that most of these kids have zero filter and will say whatever, whenever they want. I immediately took note of how little these kids tried to hide it when they did something wrong. I’m not going to deny that I checked my phone in class, or fell asleep, or had a side conversation with a friend of mine in the back of the room, but at least I tried to hide it. Credit where it is due though, these kids are creative as can be. I watched one kid position their phone up to their Chromebook, wait for a time when the rest of the class would be swiping on their Chromebooks, and then they swiped on their phone to avoid any chance of getting caught. As the next generation of teachers, I shouldn’t condone this behavior, but I was, and still am incredibly impressed.
My main takeaway here is that these kids are so much smarter and respectable than people give them credit for. In a study hall, I watched a kid struggle with a math problem for about five minutes, and I knew the golden rule was to not give them the answer, so I tried to play dumb and work through the problem with them. I said, “I might have to do this problem in college so can you go to the board and show me how to do it?” At this point, I still thought I was just being helpful, but about two minutes in I had realized that I’d completely forgotten how to do this math and might actually need this child’s help. All that being said, this kid went up to the whiteboard and solved the math problem better than I’ve seen some adults do it. It was incredible to me that they couldn’t grasp it on paper, but just needed that little extra push to get them through it. Not to toot my own horn here, but I may have a knack for this.
“Student teaching” for my fieldwork, in all, was one of the best experiences of my life. It took about fourteen cumulative hours for me to realize that these kids are wonderful, and genius. Society pushes younger generations to the curb and writes them off saying they don’t know anything, and I’ve realized that is nothing but wrong. There may be a bit of an unfiltered aspect to these kids and how they go about conversation, and you blame that on whatever social media your Mad Libs of excuses come up with this week, but that doesn’t mean it is a bad thing. Undecided students – I would’ve before, but I now couldn’t encourage you any more to look into teaching as a potential career.
Cody Fitzgerald is a 2021 Schuylerville High School grad satirizing anything and everything he can get his hands on. Aspiring to become “one of the cool” High School English teachers, he now attends Siena College and hopes to share this outlook/coping mechanism with future generations.
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