1. You will become the student they practice teaching all of their lessons on
As a student teacher, a large part of our learning comes from doing. Sometimes, this means learning from a lesson that could have gone a lot better. When we are nervous for a lesson or want to check the pacing of how we planned it, or even want some feedback; you are the first person we will go to.
2. “Let’s go get ice cream!” turns into “Only if by ice cream, you mean coffee!”
Teaching is a full-time job, even when you’re not in school. Once you’re home you’re grading, planning, or thinking about what you need to do the next day. By 7 PM you’re wondering how it isn’t 10:30 yet? Ice cream trips will no longer suffice in an effort to get you through, coffee is your only solace. Coffee flavored ice cream perhaps? Compromise.
3. Most of their conversations become about teaching
While we are completely jealous to hear about what happened on your break between classes, and the drama between so-and-so, most of our stories revolve around teaching. Our “funny stories” become how badly we needed a bathroom break but couldn’t afford to leave the classroom unattended, and a student who said/did something really funny. Or even what one teacher decided to do with their class. However, we still love getting a break from what seems to be our own separate world by hearing about your stories. They keep us sane.
4. Bed time changes, and so does sleeping in
While we all used to living on the “college” sleeping schedule- going to bed between the hours of 11PM-1AM- and waking up by 10AM for class- that is a thing of the past that we took for granted. No longer can we join the late-night trips to wawa or sheetz. In fact, before you can ask us, we will probably be sleeping in mounds of papers. Our body clocks start to see 9PM as a time we should be getting our stuff ready for the next day and heading to sleep. (being that we have to wake up before the sun comes up) This being said, forget sleeping in on the weekends. I wake up at 5:30 as if my alarm went off, go back to sleep, and find myself wide awake by 8AM. Until you’re voluntarily awake at 8AM on a weekend, you will never know how productive those few hours before everyone else wakes up can be.
5. Spring break? What spring break?
While we would LOVE nothing more than to go on that really cool trip you are planning, we will have to vicariously live through you. We are going to be super jealous when we see snapchats and Instagram posts of the $14 drink that you boomeranged a video of drinking with our friend group. While you do that, we will be grading papers and dreaming of the nap that we intend on taking. Hopefully, if you’re an education major you have other education major friends that you can plan a mini-trip with during your 4-day weekend “spring break” with. Until then, bring back all of the stories you possibly can (and maybe a souvenir?)
To all of my fellow Education Majors, this is the beginning of the rest of our lives!