If you’re an education major, first of all, go you! Second of all, education majors definitely have a different day-to-day life than other students at their university. Check out ten things that education majors deal with all the time.
1. You scrutinize your professors on whether or not they’re teaching you in an effective way. When you take your education classes, you learn all about the rights, wrongs and in-betweens of teaching. Sometimes, your professors will exemplify the best of traits, and sometimes they won’t. You take mental notes on this and discuss it with your fellow future teachers.
2. You love to learn. I mean, you want to stay in a school all your life, so why wouldn’t you? You see the importance in knowledge and understanding different subjects, which doubles in importance when you realize, oh wait, I really need to know these rock formations because I might have to teach them to fourth graders someday.
3. You juggle your school-load, observation hours in a classroom, a job that usually involves children, community service and clubs that involve helping children and more all the time. Your brain basically revolves around kids because it’s rare that you have a day where you’re not around them.
4. On that note, sometimes you forget to switch from child to adult mode. Often, in classroom presentations, you’ll begin by using your kind teacher voice and then realize, “oh wait, I’m talking to my peers.” Oops.
5. When current elementary teachers talk to your class or give you one-on-one advice, it’s hard not to be in awe of them. Most people end up leaving the field of elementary education, so their experience and genuine love for that field is inspiring.
6. You constantly hear great classroom management plans and awesome lesson ideas, and hope that you can actually remember everything when the time comes.
7. There’s so many options to consider: teaching abroad, getting a substitute license, teaching at a low income school, administration work, graduate school and more. You hope you have time for everything you want to do.
8. When you hear people say teaching is an easy job, or that getting your credential is a piece of cake, you just laugh. The day people stop classifying teaching as a cop-out job with teachers that couldn’t do anything else is the day teachers will finally earn the respect they deserve in a very difficult and demanding field. But, until then, we’ll just laugh and prove you wrong.
9. Your fellow education majors understand the craziness of your day-to-day life and they’re there for you. You dream of having Pinterest-worthy classrooms next to each other, but alas, for right now you’ll settle with acing a lesson plan presentation together.
10. You know that there’s no job more rewarding, exciting or different day-to-day. You see this as you work with kids, plan for the future and make a difference in countless lives.
*All photos courtesy of author