Surviving Student Teaching

This year my second year students are required to complete an eight-week student-teaching practicum. These students are near and dear to my heart because we spent many hours a week together throughout the entire school year last year. They are a very motivated and engaged group of students and I am genuinely impressed by all twenty of them. They are perhaps the best group of students I have ever taught.

The students each teach for one hour a week. They have to wear white lab coats with the word “ENS” sloppily stamped on the front in blue ink. The coats look ridiculous over the men’s preferred clothing item, the daraa. The arms are all bunched up inside and the “skirt” pours out from the knees like an overflowing river. One student came to school in the morning without his lab coat. The Director of the school looked at him from head to toe and gave orders that the coat must be worn. My student moaned, rolled his eyes, and reluctantly put on the coat. On one hand I really like the coats because it makes the students seem official, on the other hand the coats may make the students self-conscious or insecure and they need all the confidence they can get!

Observing my teacher-trainees teaching is a brutal process. While I sit silently in the back of the room, rapidly jotting down notes, there is a voice inside my head screaming about one thing after the next. Despite my efforts to teach classroom management this past Fall, it was clear that the students (not my trainees) were in charge in most of the classrooms. Most of my trainees completely ignored off-task students, continued talking even when the room was so loud I doubt if even one student could hear what they were saying, and let a few students dominate all class responses. One trainee spoke like a robot, another became a brutal dictator, and another transformed into a mouse, invisible to the back of the classroom. It was very difficult not to intervene. I confess that I tried to give many students the "evil eye" in out-of-control classes but even that didn't seem to have any effect. Oh how much I adore adolescent behavior!

Seeing my students teach has been one of the highlights of my work in Mauritania so far because it seems at the heart of what I am really here to do. I believe that my trainees have the potential to become the kind of teachers who they have been telling me for the past year-and-a-half that they want to become. Now I need to figure out the best way to guide them to reach this potential.  The moment is now. I better get back to work!