For the past week, I've been accumulating a pile of doubts higher than any of the snow drifts I saw over break.
Can I really be a teacher?
What if my students think I'm boring?
What if I don't know enough about global studies?
Will my cooperating teacher like me?
Higher and higher and higher until someone walking past my doubt pile might have tried to climb it search of a golden goose. Then, this morning as I was rushing to get everything done for my first student teaching seminar, I happened to glance at the cork board behind my desk where that Longfellow quote hangs. I took a deep breath, laughed softly, shook my head, and felt the muscles in my shoulders relax for the first time since last Monday.
All the fears, all the worries, all the anxieties are useless. In the end, I have two choices. I can either inch my way slowly into student teaching, taking every precaution imaginable and letting my comfort level adapt to the new change I've made before I move on, or I can just dive in! I choose the latter.
Now, I am just excited. Student teaching is going to be a grand new adventure. Refusing to take risks because I'm afraid of failure will not do me any good, and I will learn nothing. I'm certainly going to make many mistakes, and I'll probably even fall flat on my face a couple of times. But that's a good thing. Experience has taught me that the biggest mistakes and failures in life are the ones you learn the most from. So I approach my first day of student teaching with a heart for any fate! I just hope that fate is not a coronary :)
For some reason, a "pile of doubts" reminds me of this amusing little story:
ReplyDeleteA well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"
What's beneath your pile of doubts? I know what usually seems to be beneath mine….