Good Riddance

It just occurred to me that I haven't posted anything about my student-teaching experience. So to bring those of you who haven't heard up to speed, here's the short version.

I've been student teaching in a third-grade class since August. I thought winning over the poor kids with meth-head parents would be the hardest part. Boy was I wrong.

Somehow I was placed with a teacher who never welcomed me or the students into her classroom. To say the least, she is extremely unstable and I never knew if Jekyll or Hyde would show up to school every day. She didn't include me when she planned lessons, I never knew what was going on in the class. When she DID give me something to do, it was either a menial task like sharpening all the pencils... or the opposite extreme - when she would just throw books at me and tell me to plan lessons on my own. Some days, she only said two sentences to me. Whenever she did let me teach the kids, she left the room.

After enduring this for six weeks, she and I finally had the "this isn't working" conversation. It ended with a mutual agreement that I should be transferred to another school for the rest of my student teaching. Then, for some odd reason, she started being nice to me. She planned the afternoon with me. She planned the next two days with me. Then she asked me if I wanted to solo teach the whole day. I said I would teach a few lessons but not the whole day.

When I showed up today, she wasn't in the classroom. I sat down to get ready for school, and the principal came in. He asked me what I was doing there. Long story short, she's nice to me and plans to have me teach, then she has the principal come tell me to get out. I wrote a note saying goodbye to the students and left.

I feel like I've been to crazytown and back. I'm frustrated and confused. But not defeated. I realize that I have to stop trying to understand what my mentor was all about. I don't know when she was being real or fake. It's pointless to dwell on the whole thing. I guess the main point is, I'm outta there and I'm not wasting any more time on this.

A personal mentor of mine told me today that we can't dwell on understanding sick, twisted individuals. Because if we truly did understand how they work and why they do these things, we would be capable of doing the same things ourselves. I have to accept what happened in my brain, then dump it out and move on. She's right.