A Novice Teacher

What an eye opener it was. I was invited to a local middle school to teach seventh graders about Financial Literacy, Decision Making and Careers (courtesy of Junior Achievement). After 12 forty minute periods, I came away with even more respect for good teachers, a lot of appreciation for how sophisticated today’s teenagers are and an appreciation for the substance of many of the things educators say every day.

I prepared before each class, using the teacher’s guide I was given, sorting out and playing with the manipulatives and, at the beginning, writing my own personal “script”. I soon found out, however, that a script doesn't take you very far, esp. in a roomful of adolescents.

Some of the things I learned:

* There is no substitute for personal connection to and facility with the material. It allows you to respond to and interact with the ebb and flow of the classroom, bring the discussion back around to whatever your objective is and build on students’ curiosity even when it’s peripheral to the main topic

* Wow, do these kids need a hands-on, diverse, active, engaging approach! They are easily distracted and quite varied (intellectually, socially, knowledge-wise, etc). They are natural multi-taskers. Recently the head of Math for a large district in MD observed the following in an email to me: “The traditional class structure in which the teacher does most of the talking and the students just sit and listen and do practice problems for a whole class period (day in and day out) is not effective for a large number of students.” Boy, do I get it!

* Each class is a such a small part of a student’s day, and mind share, that it’s a real challenge to reach beyond the 4 walls and 40 minutes you share. I was humbled, and flattered, when I ran in to one of my students’ parents at a ball game. When I mentioned that her boy was in one of my classes she remarked that he had been talking about financial literacy around the dinner table and had been wondering where he was picking it up. What a great feeling. In a very small way, I can begin to appreciate what keeps so many of our great teachers coming back year after year.

My final observation is that this experience reinforced to me the wisdom of hiring teachers at Walch. At least half of our product development and partnership team has experience in the classroom- there's no substitute.