The Engineering School, Boston, MA
Casey Mahoney, 2011
Looking back on the month, I feel that I performed well in the duties expected of me and took on many duties and roles that were not necessarily “assigned” to me. In the first week of observing, it was hard to take much initiative in the classroom beyond answering a few random side questions and such, as students were writing for the first three days and Matt, whose classroom I observed, had made his plans for the rest of the week. Nevertheless, I gathered plenty of insight from the discussions and meetings with faculty in which I participated. In the second week, I was eager to take on some lessons, and I feel that in my preparation of the lessons, my communicating my plans with Matt, and in my presentation of them I met and his expectations for me, a prospective teacher with no teaching experience in a high school classroom.
Being in front of a class was much more difficult than I expected: I overestimated first, the amount of work that I could accomplish in a period and second, the ease with which I would be able to have an at-ease rapport with the class. Proper discipline and general order was something I really had to work at maintaining, especially since during my first period, Matt was called away and I was on my own, and frankly, I was caught off guard, since I had never been in an urban school. Yet, I did have a number of successes while teaching. I felt like I provided quite a few “aha” moments of understanding, especially when going over some of the SAT test preparation, but also when some of the students started to get engaged with the history debates activity and were arguing and conceding points.
Having led multiple retreat-type trips with middle- and high- school-aged students before, I knew that the week at Middlebury with ten eleventh-grade students would be a long, high-energy, busy, sometimes stressful, but mostly fun adventure. My performance exceeded what was “expected” of me, in the sense that an extraordinary amount of predicting, planning, and quick execution was required for a smoothly run week to have happened, and I feel that I did all these well. At some times, I felt that the facilitation of the events, getting people places, planning ahead, and so forth, sometimes got in the way of my being able to be totally present to the students at all times, but overall, I was also successful in that.
This relates well to what is one of the most important things I learned through this internship. In my “Literacy Across the Secondary Curriculum” course in Fall 2008, Dr. Claudia Cooper said on multiple occasions, “The profession of teaching involves being a student of students.” Seeing the vast range of interests, backgrounds, motivation levels, and so much more, all of which differed to a great degree from what I am used to seeing in a high school setting, Claudia’s statement has become a concrete reality for me as a prospective teacher. It is indeed crucial for teachers to be aware of their students and their needs on so great a level, and the intricacies of this task were made much more apparent to me during my internship.
I also learned plenty about the career industry in general. After seeing two of us interns’ supervising teachers receive news that they would most likely be laid off at the end of the school year, the issue of job security became a bit more concrete for me as well. I cannot say whether or not I will be a teacher at some point in my life; nevertheless, this experience showed me how necessary professionalism, colleagueship, collaboration, and utilization of resources and staff development/training all are to a workplace. In my career search, it will be important for me to find an organization that values and models these things as well as TES did in Boston.
Although I have worked with different organizations on projects and activities similar to the ones I participated in during this internship, this was certainly a unique combination of observation and leading, of looking back and planning ahead, and of involvement in others’ education and promotion of my own. I am glad I had this opportunity and feel that it will most definitely have an influence on where I am headed on my future career search.
Contact the Career Services Office for more information on this internship.