"Houston, the Eagle Has Landed"

Well, it's been a disconcerting few days. Our "grades" for student teaching were to have been posted by 10 a.m. Saturday morning, Dec. 12. However, when I checked yesterday about 2 p.m., my transcript reflected a "NR" (not reported). This was rather concerning because, to be honest, the paper I wrote that analyzed my semester of student teaching was a piece of garbage. That really is uncharacteristic of my normal overachieving nature, but considering all the issues and stress of changing schools and coming into student teaching mid-semester, I really didn't feel I had a wealth of material in which to develop an accurate, meaningful paper. So, I kind of cheated. I took last an old methods paper from last year and tweaked it to fit my student teaching paper.

I really didn't feel that guilty about doing that because I know for a fact that my professor didn't even read the last year's methods paper. I surmise that she didn't read this latest one either because there were some obvious and glaring errors in the report. For example, I forgot to change the profiles of the individual students in my paper; I described them as two 11-year-old females. That should have been a major red flag since I was teaching sophomores and juniors in high school, and generally they are not 11-years old. It demonstrates the level of competency in my education program in that I knew I would be able to get away with recycling an old paper. Secondarily, I suppose it may also indicate a lack of integrity and general scrupulousness all the way around— by extension, yours truly, unfortunately.

It poses another interesting question as well: does the fact that I was able to shirk a component in my student teaching promote the idea to teacher candidates that it is also O.K. to allow their own students to "work the system?" In some regard there is always a way to bypass red tape when following any prescribed process; it's just that it's rather disappointing to me. It breeds laziness and incompetency. Then again, this same game is what has just happened in the U.S. stock markets and banking system. This kind of slackadaisical attitude is what I've written about in my earlier posts: the system of education in this country is doing very little to promote a strong work ethic and, therefore, the posterity (and prosperity) of America is at risk. But, while I'm jobless and not teaching, I'll have plenty of time to contemplate these issues and "massage" them into something that makes some kind of sense to me. At the rate the economic recovery is going, I think I'll probably have plenty of time to do just that.

Anyway, earlier today I checked my transcript, and there is now finally an "S" (satisfactory completion) reflected on my student teaching. "The Eagle has landed." Now all I have to do is clean up the disaster zone that is my bedroom, which is full of leftover assignment sheets, lesson plans, books, and basic "teacher crap" that seems to be part and parcel of the the profession.