For those of you who don’t already know, I am a Secondary Education student who is focusing on Social Studies. The last part of my degree is student teaching. This entails a whole lot of stress that I never thought I would experience.
Student teaching is basically sixteen weeks of being in an actual classroom, with actual students, and planning real lessons. You spend time with your mentor (the actual teacher), teaching and formulating these lessons to enrich the minds of the students. The part that everyone hates is the EdTPA. This part of the course sucks the life out of you, makes you cry, and even makes you almost reconsider your career path.
Basically, you select what you want to teach for a segment of 3-5 lessons. This should involve a pretest, some assignments, and a quiz to see if you actually taught them something. You have to record your teaching and totally destroy yourself by writing down what you did wrong. You must evaluate your assessments to see if your students actually learned anything at all.
The normal range for how many pages you could write is 60 on the low end and 150 on the high end. So, yeah, I am super duper panicking.
I have a lot of work to do in order to make sure my rough draft is enough for me to be called a great first year teacher. I turn my final in on the 11th of April, so wish me luck. PLEASE.