I’ve always been a reader and a writer. In grade school I was a book addict as recorded in My Reading Autobiography. In high school I edited the monthly school publication and was one of four students who took an a college-level writing course. During the first semesters in my teacher preparation program, I thought about what I would use to engage my students in good literature, how I would support struggling readers and how I could pass on my love of reading to my students.
I am now just months from completing a five-year teacher education program and I have had multiple student-teaching placements over the last five years. Each one of them was educational, challenging, and enjoyable. Each of my mentor teachers has a different area of expertise and passion which I could learn from. Each class had a very different group of students than the last. But all of these placements had one thing in common: I only saw math, science, and social studies.
I was in semester nine of ten with five placements already behind me before I was able to plan and implement a longer writing activity with a group of students. Instead, in classroom after classroom, I found myself taking over the math block or the science block and occasionally a social studies lesson as well. I have figured out the challenges of cardinality for kindergarten students, I have learned a variety of strategies for demonstrating equivalent fractions for third grade students, I have challenged fifth grade students with fraction talks, and I have struggled with number lines alongside a student with autism.
I’ve always been a writer, but at the end of the day, the things I love to do most are the things I feel confident at and at this point, confidence has more to do with experience than any other factor. A few weeks ago I wrote in my classroom notebook that “I’m finding that the subjects I liked the least in school are the ones I enjoy teaching now”.
So I was beginning to feel okay with my identity as a math teacher. Until last week.
My new placement is a secondary special education setting – vastly different from the elementary school that has become a home over the last four years. Not only am I teaching larger, older students, I’m teaching them math. And math in high school is not fractions and number lines anymore.
So now I’m looking at teaching about slope, coordinate planes, inequalities and quadratic equations to high school freshmen and juniors with autism, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities and more. I hope that my math teacher identity survives these next eight weeks.
Anetta Shirky 