I know we briefly talked in class about not feeling prepared to go out as teachers in the next year. I just wanted to let you guys know that I am working with a 5th grade teacher in Burke County for my Block 1 internship. She is an Appalachian graduate. I asked her the other day to tell me honestly if she felt prepared when she left ASU to go out and teach. She told me, "No." She said a lot of what goes on she was very not aware of. That worries me and makes me very nervous. I want to leave here feeling prepared. I want to know what you guys think about this and maybe some of the areas in which you feel we need to be more prepared before we become teachers.

edit

I think that everyone is scared to start teaching. I haven’t talked to an education major yet who is not nervous or worried about teaching in a real classroom. I know that I’m scared to death but as far as being prepared I think I will be able to get by. I’m lucky enough to be in the Business education department at ASU and I can honestly say that with all of the observation hours I have done and all the time I have spent in the classroom that I think I will be ready to teach. I’M SCARED OUT OF MY MIND, but feel confident in my ability to teach. In my opinion this readiness that I have comes from spending so much time in the classroom.

The majority of the future teachers that come out of college are usually not prepared for what they are getting into. I don't neccesarily mean that they don't know their material or subject matter, I mean that going from a controlled environment such as tutoring in the schools or helping out with a summer camp is not the same as having your own class. When we all get to have our own class full of students that we are responsible for then that is when I think we will feel the most vunerable . I have several close friends that are teachers and some of them graduated from App. and everyone of them have told me the same think and that is that you will learn to deal with your class by trail and error. In the PE department we get the opportunity to teach home school kids for several weeks. This has been a great experience because it has allowed us to deal with some real issuses. We get to run the event as if it were our own class. Most of what we have learnd f [list=]
[/list]

I think anytime you go into anything new you feel somewhat unprepared. I think the more time we spend in the schools (student teaching) the better we will feel about what we do. I have heard people who have graduated from app, in all majors, say that they didnt feel prepared when they started their new jobs. I know when I started here at App I felt that I wasn't prepared for college and it took me a month or so to get use to the differences from high school. I think we all should just relax, because it's going to be a learning experience for us all in the next few years.

I'm with Tracy on the benefit of the observation hours. I too am a Business Ed major and have had to long around 90 hours of observations. Another advantage I have is that I currently work in a high school and have had to cover some classes for a brief period of time. Even with all that, I am still scared. As Danny said, anything new scares people. We just have to let the students believe we know what we're doing.

I am extremely nervous about going into the classroom. At this point, I am not prepared in the least bit. In 2800, we played games with students which did nothing to prepare me. In Block I now, I am working with a 3rd grade class. I feel like I have so much that I have to do to get the assignments done for my class that I feel like I am not getting the most out of the experience. I hope that I will learn some from this practicum and the internship that we have to do in Block II.

We will not be prepared right when we go out. We will probably be more prepared than we think. We may not realize at the point of graduation how prepared we really are. Once we have been in the teaching field for a few years, we might be able to look back and see that we were really prepared for things than we thought for. Pressure sometimes leads us to feel as though we are not prepared. If we will just sit back and relax, we will be able to see that we are somewhat prepared, but not fully.