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October 1, 2006

Kate Stephens. "Images of Teaching"

Images of Teaching
Kate Stephens
Norris Elementary School
Full Text PDF (119kb)

Images of Teaching


Image: A Blanketed Seed

A brand new teacher finds herself suddenly alone with a classroom full of kids and an awesome responsibility. She begins, slowly, to piece together how to do her job, to make sense of her new role. She must feel her way along that first year, as though making her way down a long passageway blindfolded. Along the way, many stressors and burdens present themselves. She makes mistakes. Some have implications that end up being more important or less important than she'd expected. As uncertainty and confusion build, underneath it all she has her reason for being there. It is clear and perfectly smooth. It is the seed for her life as a teacher. That first year, layer after colorful layer of questions and problems blanket her seed, her reason for being there. At times, she feels overwhelmed, buried in unresolved issues, frustration and dissatisfaction in her own work. But as the layers pile on, she grows slowly savvy to them, and the strength of her clear, smooth protected seed carries her through.
 

Image: Graph of Energy and Attitudes

Three years after her first day of teaching, a special education teacher grew aware with surprise of the range of kinds of days she had. Some days she was the teacher she wanted to be, feeling proud and rewarded with each encounter she had with her students. She knew she was in the right place. Other days, she had little energy, and she knew before her students even arrived that she was “off�? and would be waiting for 3:00 to come all day long. On these days, she felt like a failure, a fraud. She looked for patterns and explanations for such extreme variations. There were so many factors to consider that it was difficult to point to any one reason for her feelings. She could map the variations of energy and variations of her personal attitudes she had towards her work and towards her existence as a teacher. The lines were jagged, almost frantically bouncing up and down. She wondered if they would ever plateau at a nice height.

Posted on October 1, 2006 8:00 PM