Handing Over My Classroom

I remember when I was student teaching feeling somewhat unwelcome in my cooperating teacher's classroom. She never quite let me teach my way, insisting I not only teach what she wanted taught but teach it exactly as she would. As a student teacher that was incredibly difficult. I was already nervous and intimidated and not being able to really explore my own teaching style made it worse. I almost quit about half way through. She could not hand her classroom over to someone else.

This week I'm passing my beginning students to someone else. A former student who graduated last year is coming in to teach for the week. He was my stage manager on every show, helped me direct  and basically helped me survive my first year. A variety of circumstances led up to this taking place, but I think it is good for my students to experience different teaching and theatre styles. While it has been nice to have a bit of time to get some work done, it has been harder to hand my students over to another teacher than I thought it would be.

I think it is hard for a few reasons. First, I want my students to like me. Having someone else comes in feels like a threat since they might think he is more fun, etc. I realize that this is unreasonable and irrelevant for a variety of reasons, but it is still hard.

Second, as he has been teaching, I see him making many of the mistakes I have in the past and still do now. It is hard to see a lesson not going well because I care about him and want his lessons to go well. I also have an extreme aversion to embarrassment. Watching mistakes being made brings up reminders of mistakes I made and I hate that. I hate being reminded of the things I've done wrong. It is nice that I can see what is not working and why. I can see that he's not waiting for quiet, that he's doing the work for them, that he's not connecting activities to learning goals and not teaching before students are expected to know the answers. I've done all of that and I still do on occasion.

Third, these are my students, I've been training them in a certain way and I'm concerned I'll have to re-train them when they come back to me. I care about them learning and am worried they aren't getting what they should out of this week. We'll just have to see what happens.

I get why my cooperating teacher had trouble with me in her classroom. It is hard to pass your room off to someone else, even someone you know well and trust.