Nerves

I have my first set of parent-teacher conferences tomorrow. And even though everyone tells me there's no need to be nervous, I am. I just have this irrational (maybe not entirely irrational) fear that some parent will come in and yell at me about their kid, or that they'll come in and ask about their son or daughter and I won't know what to tell them because I'll go blank.

I know these fears are ridiculous, of course.

But still.

The good thing is that I won't (obviously) be dealing with it on my own--my cooperating teacher will be in the room the whole time with me and will help me to field any problems. Also, our conferences are student-led, which means that the student has to explain his/her grade to his/her parent as soon as they come into the classroom, and the parents can then go to the teacher if there are any further questions.

My cooperating teacher says that there usually isn't.

But nerves aside about tomorrow, I decided this week that becoming a teacher is feeling a lot I felt when becoming a missionary: I know where I want to be, but I can so clearly see how my weaknesses impede me from getting there. And of course, the same weaknesses I had as a missionary still trail me as a teacher.

But one thing that I decided to start working on this week was to really try to start forming relationships with the students so that they know I care about them. I've put all this time into preparing what I think are great, engaging, and meaningful lessons, but I still think that the kids still feel a little disconnected from me, even though I already just love them all.

So today I started trying harder--I discussed a book with a student that we both had read, I asked if a particularly shy boy in one of my classes had played his new computer game again that he was telling me about, and I made sure to speak to this one girl that the other teachers say will only talk to me. And you know what? I could see a visible difference in the kids' countenances and I could feel that trust was beginning to be formed.

I've also done some pretty stupid stuff in the last week, like speaking sharply (maybe a little too sharply) to two boys who were roughhousing each other in the classroom and telling the kids that they shouldn't call each other names (after which I found out that the kids had not called the student "dummy" as I had thought, but his nickname "Johnny"). Ah, the joy of messing up. As a teacher, I'm starting to get kind of used to it.

But I'm still loving the experience all the same.