I remember well my first year of college. As a music major, I was part of a fairly small group of students – while the education department at a university is usually rather large, the music department can number no more than three or four hundred to the university’s fifteen thousand.
One of the advantages of this system is that it’s not uncommon for freshman to intermingle with upperclassmen on a daily basis. One of the older students who was in his second week of student teaching had dropped by the music building, for what I can’t recall. He decided to sit down for a moment, plopping himself onto a lounge couch.
‘I’m so tired,’ he said. ‘After four years of a full class load, a couple hours of instrument practice a day, homework, and a part-time job, I wasn’t expecting to be so...tired.’
He was happy with his chosen profession, and excited about his future as a teacher, but still surprised that the daily job would take so much out of him. I should note, he was a long-distance runner who worked construction on his summer breaks. He was not out of shape.
Teaching demands much of us. There is so much to juggle: short and long-term classroom objectives, development standards, classroom management, homework, scheduling, parents to update and inform, administrative tasks to attend to, and of course the list goes on.
Every student is different, and each has their own needs. Those needs must be met in various ways, and there is only so much time before our students pass on to the next phase of their lives. There are students with all different needs and abilities. Yet each student deserves our care and attention, and when we give them what they need, teaching is one of the most rewarding professions in the world, no question about it!
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