I love to teach. There’s nothing more exciting to me than getting through to students about things that are useful for them to know. I have very few reservations about things that I do in the classroom If I think that they will help me get results for the students.
     As a young teacher I am still very new at this game. There are a lot of things that I am still learning. One of the things that I pride myself upon is the fact that I am always learning from everything I do. When I teach I always try to do it to the best of my ability. It never fails though that when I’m done I see something that I could have done better. Sometimes my mentor teacher points these things out to me, and sometimes I see them myself. When I identify things though, I naturally want to fix them.
     Last semester when I taught at Western Michigan University I had to do a reflective journal for the seminar class that went along with my teaching. Every week I would turn in lesson plans and talk about the things that I had done in class. My supervisor was often telling me that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. My students were still learning even if I thought that I could have done something better here or there.
     The more I look back on those responses the more that I see that she was correct. In my internship I’ve had the opportunity to notice and fix these perceived shortcomings because of the fact that I teach the same class twice a day. I don’t like to look at my morning class as practice for the afternoon one, but sometimes that is the way it is because I’m so much more prepared to teach in the afternoon after seeing what went well or didn’t in the morning.
     Though this trait discourages me sometimes I’d have to say that I think that there is more of an upside to it than not. There really isn’t that much wrong with wanting to do things better. In the moment perhaps it can be distracting wanting everything to go to perfection, but reflection after the fact can only be positive and lead to better teaching in the future.