Intern Journal

I have always wanted to be a teacher. I used to joke that after being told all my life to sit down and be quiet, becoming a teacher would allow me to stand up and talk. I never really knew what grades I waned to teach I just knew that if I had any gift at all it was the ability to explain things to people. A few years ago I lead a poetry workshop at Holy Heart for World Poetry Day on a Friday and then taught in a graduate seminar the next Monday. The interesting thing was that I was essentially teaching the same thing (the materiality of language as revealed through concrete and sound poetry) but at wildly different levels. To put it another way, teaching isn’t about a canon of information but rather a canon of methods.

To think back to the seven week mark of this internship I can use my personal online journal and discussions I had with other teachers that are archived in my Googlechat. By the middle of the internship things weren’t going well. I had received a good evaluation form my main cooperating teacher and my second cooperating teacher was already asking me for resources that I had developed but I still felt a bit lost in the school. I was, in fact, intimidated. Now, I am 6’4” and nearly 200 pounds but I still felt apprehensive in trying to discipline the students. I felt that I was having no effect on any of them. I had trouble remembering all of the names of one of my classes and I have to say that I was not feeling all that successful. I was just blown away by how rude the students were. The casualness of the profanity was startling. My wife says that I overestimated the students and I guess I was lucky in that in all of my previous classroom experience I was a guest so would be afforded some sort of courtesy. In my classes at Bishops it seemed that my inexperience with some of the course material provided the students with a license to be disruptive. I’m not a loud person. I told my cooperating teacher that in order for me to be aggressive I have to go some place outside of myself; much the same way an actor does.
I wasn’t sure that I had the temperament for the daily abuse that teachers seem to get. The teachers talked about having to get students removed from their classrooms as if it were nothing. This was totally different from my own high school experience where even though there were 1600 students in a building built for 1200 and a mix of social classes and languages, I always felt safe. I just didn’t feel at ease in the first part of my internship.

I was also under a lot of personal stress as the decision to go back to school was a huge risk for my family and had created very serious financial hardship. If the decision to get my teaching license turned out to be a bad one then what had I put my family through for the past 20 months? I don’t know what I was expecting but after seven weeks I definitely had serious reservations about spending the rest of my working life in a Newfoundland high school. What compounded the frustration was that I had always prided myself on being able to get through to the marginalized kids. I volunteer with ‘at risk’ youth and have been able to engage some pretty hard young people in educational pursuits. I was also feeling frustrated by the material I was expected to teach. There were no curricular resources for one course as the teacher had just “taught it from [his] head for the last seven years”. So I had to develop materials as I went along. I know that it wasn’t supposed to be an enjoyable experience but I had no idea how depressing the whole thing was going to be.

But, there was a light on the horizon. Unlike Paul whose epiphany occurred on the road to Damascus mine happened at a farmhouse near St. Marys, Ontario. This will all be discussed in my final journal entry.