Keeping the faith

Well, it has been a long time since I have updated this blog about my teaching career.  For the past two years I have been working on completing my Master's degree, which I did in June.  I thought that I could work the summer and tide myself over until school started again and I honestly thought that I would have a job by now!  I thought that the Master's degree would the be the key to immediate hiring.  Well, it turns out that I was wrong, really wrong.  Now, I don't mean to have sounded overconfident regarding my degree but I really thought that my degree would be my "golden ticket."  Now, enough of the pity party but what I am proud to say is that my degree gave me more than I ever expected.  After my teaching experience in MT, I still knew that this was the right profession for me but I didn't know how to talk about my experience except to say how horrible it was at times and that I learned a lot.  Awesome.  I learned a lot. My experience at SPU while earning my degree taught me that there is a triune relationship that must exist for a classroom to be an education learning environment.  That triune relationship consists of school, parents, and community.  It takes a team to educate the whole child.  This is what was missing from my experience and made me feel like I was living in a foreign country and taking the role of a drill sergeant rather than a teacher.  I learned how incredibly important it is to understand the culture in which I teach.  I had an epic failure the first two months of school with my classroom management because I did not know that these students had no ability to think in the abstract.  It took me two months to learn that money, even fake Monopoly-like money was a powerful tool in educating them about value, cost, and responsibility.  I never used the money for academic values (like incentive to turn in work-that was expected-no questions).  Rather, I used it to teach them the value of proper behavior and to show that when they earned more money, they were rewarded and could have privileges.  Again, back to feeling like a drill sergeant because I took away all privileges and they had to earn them with behavior.  This experiences was me learning about the culture in which I was teaching.
I have many, many examples of what I learned about my experience in MT through my program.  Even though, at this time I do not have my classroom there is still hope.  After all, school doesn't start for three weeks.  I just have to keep the faith that I am destined to be a teacher and that my next experience will help me understand what I want to learn about in my PhD program.