I’m pretty sure it hasn’t hit me yet that I’m not going back. It’s hard to imagine that my routine will be different next Monday. Instead of returning to 2nd grade I will be lining up to practice graduating! In the early weeks of student teaching when I looked at the calendar and the weeks and weeks that remained before I would complete my student teaching requirements, I thought it would take FOREVER to get to this day. It turns out the weeks fly by much faster than I could have imagined.
You may think student teachers go to their placements in order to learn how to teach, but it turns out what I was really learning this semester what how to love a child. We all know those sparkly, bubbly, happy kids who are easy-going and sweet; it’s easy to love them (especially if someone else is disciplining them, and their parents take them home at night). And we all know those kids who are just plain naughty and you wish their parents would control them! In a public school classroom, chances are you will have a nice mixture of the two. But you soon realize that some of those sparkly, bubbly kids can have an attitude when they aren’t in control, and some of the naughty ones can steal your heart.