Ready, Set, Teach

It was kind of difficult thinking of a memorable experience I've had from adulthood. Being 19, I feel like I haven't been an adult for very long and not much has gone on. But after thinking about it for a while, I chose my experience in joining Ready, Set, Teach. RST is a class that my friends and I took last year during our senior year of high school. The students got to leave campus for a few hours everyday and go visit a certain elementary school. The class was more geared towards students who wanted to become teachers in the future but the majority of us took this class just so we could leave school in the middle of the day.

At our elementary schools, we were each assigned a certain classroom to help out with during the year. I was assigned a 2nd grade gate class with nineteen kids in it. I was a little nervous and dreading it at first because I knew that was a lot of kids and I wasn't sure if they would even like me or not. But after their teacher introduced me on the first day and told them why I was there, the kids automatically treated me like we were best friends or something. After the first couple of weeks of getting to know everybody, I actually looked forward to going to their class everyday. When I would walk in the room every morning the whole class would scream my name and get all excited. It was pretty cool. They were always asking me what high school was like and they were all amazed that I knew how to drive a car. It is so funny how children are so interested in the littlest things.

At the beginning of the time while I worked in their class, the teacher would have me rearrange the bookshelf, grade papers, or go make copies. Which was mostly boring, busy work that I didn't really enjoy. But soon after that, she started letting me read books to the class at story time and even give them their spelling test on Fridays. It was way more fun because I got to interact with the kids. Some days I was even in charge of teaching the class their math or reading lesson for the day. That was a little more intimidating because that was a lot more important than just reading them a book. I didn't want to screw up the lesson and teach them the wrong thing. But I ended up doing alright.

There were a couple of students in the class that were severely failing their spelling tests. The teacher let me work with them in a small group everyday on the side of the classroom. We made up a game where I would describe one of their spelling words and the kids tried to guess which one it was. The first one to guess the word had to spell it correctly to get a point. It doesn't sound too great, but to them it was the best game in the world. The kids in the group took their spelling tests separate from the whole class and we always played that game right before. Apparently that game works somehow because they would always pass it afterwards!

At the end of the year it was kind of sad saying goodbye to them because I knew most likely I would never see them ever again. The only reason I joined this program was to leave school early but it ended up meaning a lot more. Before this experience, I never even thought about being a teacher in my life. My mom is an elementary school teacher which made me not want to do it even more, seeing all the work she has to do. But after this experience, I realized I really enjoy working with kids and it made me consider this as a possible career choice for my future.