" Our Preparation to Teach ":A Reflective Classroom Teacher 14

Our preparation to enter the teaching profession was good but it was just not complete. This was in no way the fault of the College of Education that we attended, nor was it through any fault of our own. The college perceived our needs as a first year teacher and presented it in a nicely packaged sequence of course work starting in our sophomore years. We were often told that we would learn more in our first year of teaching, about teaching, than we had in the past four years of college. This statement turned out to be true. We learned quickly that the classroom was not perfect place to work.
We had not been adequately prepared to deal with the diversity we found in that first classroom. We had been given an ideal to follow but the real had been glossed over time and time again. The reality of that first year of teaching brought us to our knees more than once. You see, we were dealing with the reality that all students could learn. This is true enough, but we believed students could all learn the same things the same way. The results of our efforts that first year were traumatic. We just could not get through to some students. Our self-esteem often hit bottom and we realized that if we could not find a solution to this problem of idealism, we would be out the door and into another profession believing we were a failure as a teacher.