Plantistic

I would just like to send out a heart-felt thank you to every teacher I have every had. I know that teaching was going to be work. I expected that. But there are so many details that most are not aware of, unless they themselves are a teacher. Not only do you need to plan the activities for the day, you need to ensure that each child feels a part of the classroom community, has a chance to succeed, learns manners, appreciates others, make sure that each student succeeds in each standard (there are about 800 different standards for each grade), they are expected to continue their professional development with meetings, classes, and conferences, they need to make copies, run overheads, read their 50 emails a day, and then do it all again the next day!! Plus I know that with conferences and unit tests (even with two of us in the room) if I were a real teacher I would have worked about 10-15 unpaid hours for this week. Wow. Actually, I have to pay the school for this experience (don't even get me started on that part) but what other profession do you know of that someone would spend hours outside of their workday to prepare for the little minds that will be there tomorrow??

At this moment I am planning a social studies unit. This task has proven to be very exciting, yet fun. I have never really thought about all the work and planning that goes into just 30 minutes of student learning. Not only that, but I have never had the experience of writing even a single lesson plan in social studies, and here I am about to embark on a monumental endeavor of teaching 8 year olds about the ancient civilizations of Egypt and China. I think the students will really enjoy it. I also appreciate the subject for really lending itself to my own creativity. I am just thankful that there are actually other people out there to do this job!!