First of all, this is my first education-related blog post since before my student teaching experience began. I recently reread this blog of mine and realized how much I miss sharing my ridiculous thoughts and opinions about education-related topics with others who can relate. I also miss creating cartoons to entertain the masses. Now that I’ve had one year of student teaching, several months of co-teaching at a privately-owned learning center, and a couple months of substitute teaching under my belt, I think now would be as good of a time as any to return to the edublogging world because there is just so much that can be discussed with regards to teaching.
The Issue at Hand
Today, I’d like to discuss a pet peeve of mine that has made a surprisingly large impact on how I am perceived in the professional world: my size. I have always been a very short, thin, light-weight person – it’s genetic. For years, those who don’t know me – and even many people who do – have been mistaking me for somebody much younger in age. When I was a child, their guesses were only mildly off.
But as time progressed, this problem got worse and worse.
One of my biggest pet peeves is people telling me that when I’m older, I’ll appreciate looking younger. As of right now, how I’m going to feel about this situation in the future does not matter to me – I have to learn how to deal with all the problems it’s causing me now because something tells me these problems are going to impact my professional life for a while.
Now, when I was growing up and going through school, I was always on the smaller side of my classmates. With the exception of middle school, when I had a sudden, six-inch growth spurt and was actually taller than most of my classmates for a couple years, I’ve always had to look way up to talk to most people my age. This was never something that bothered me, and nobody treated me any differently because I was a little bit shorter than most, so it’s not something I often thought about; therefore, I was not prepared for the enormous impact my size would have on my professional life.
So how, specifically, has my size affected my teaching experiences so far? Let’s just put it this way: while I was at my student teaching placement last year, I was mistaken for a student at least once a day. Yes, and these mistakes lasted the entire school year. Even in May, teachers would confront me about why I was parking in the teacher lot. The vice principal yelled at me for taking food out of the cafeteria, insisting that students were not permitted to do that. The cafeteria lady was hesitant to let me cut in line because she wasn’t convinced that I was actually a student teacher (the school at which I did my student teaching did not issue IDs to student teachers, so there was really no way of proving that I was.) The librarian would ask me where my pass was every time I entered the library. I would often hear students in the hallway whispering about me when I walked by, thinking I didn’t hear them, and talking about how tiny I am and how they thought I was a student. Although my year of student teaching was an overall positive experience in my professional growth, these particular episodes made me realize that if I wanted to be a high school teacher, there would be so many complications.
But it didn’t stop there. Every time I am called to be a substitute in a high school class, there are always a few kids who give me strange looks when they first walk in. I’ve had a few ask me whether or not I was a student. I’m always thankful when I see one of the kids I taught last year walk in any room I am the sub for because then at least one person in that class knows better!
The first time I ever did a substitute teaching job, I was assigned to an art class at the school at which I student taught last year. When the ladies in the office saw me trying to pick up a sub folder, one of them asked me, “Weren’t you a student here last year?”
AHHHHHHHHHHH!!
An Unlikely Solution
The best part about substitute teaching is that you can be called to teach any subject area at any type of public school in the districts that you choose. It was just recently that I was called to sub at a place that was familiar to me, but a place to which I never thought I would willingly return, a place of locker jams and lip gloss…a place of awkward height differences and changing voices…a place where “dances” consist of the boys standing on one side of the room and the girls standing on the other…a place where most people can claim that they spent the most awkward years of their lives…MIDDLE SCHOOL!!!
If I could go back in time and tell my middle school self that in the future, I would be thankful to go back there, my middle school self would most definitely question my sanity. She would probably ask me what would make me so inclined to return to middle school after earning a Master’s degree from a topnotch institution. I would like to think that perhaps my middle school self would be smart enough to put two and two together to figure out that my 23-year-old self is a teacher, but it’s been so long that I forgot exactly how strong my logical thinking skills were in middle school.
Anyway, middle schoolers. Interacting with them is entirely different from interacting with high schoolers. For one, I actually look like an adult compared to them. Because of this, I have noticed that when I sub for middle school classes, the students tend to treat me with more respect (ie: they quiet down when I ask them, they follow my directions, they are more likely to follow the usual classroom rules and not try to trick me into doing things their normal teacher would not let them do.)
I remember being in middle school and viewing many of my classmates as self-centered, outspoken brats. While I doubt that a whole lot has changed there, from the perspective of the students, as a teacher, I do notice a certain intimidation that middle schoolers have around authority figures that seems to wear off by the time they hit high school. It really makes my job a lot easier. There are definitely advantages and disadvantages to teaching the middle and high school age groups, but now that I am aware of the enormous difference in my teaching experiences based upon something as mundane as my physical size, I am leaning more towards applying to jobs at middle schools…at least until I am old enough for people to mistake me for a college student!
Now I extend my hand to the education community by posing this question: What were some challenges you faced when you started teaching that you did not foresee prior to the experience?
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