Eric Michals

There are so many things future interns need to know about teaching at a school. I could go on for

hours about the things people should know about such as how much time it takes to plan a lesson or in my

case make 400 flashcards, but I guess all of my advice could be summed up into one word. Patience is the key

to interning as a student teacher.

The first day a intern walks in the best thing to do is survey the class about what they like, find fun, and

most importantly their name. The way I did this was to talk to students one on one for the first week or two in

order to try and form a connection. This will take time so if an intern decides to take this route they have to be

patient. Yes, it is extremely exciting to be going to a teaching internship and I am sure everyone that was an

intern this year would agree that they were ready to teach the first day and they were ready to jump in, but that

is from the perspective that we had never gone through this before. Another thing that we agreed on a couple

of hours after our first day is that none of us were ready, which is surprisingly a good thing. A new intern needs

patience to see that they don’t know everything, especially a VTFT 1 student. Take the time one needs to

make sure everything thought out. I waited till the last month of my internship to teach and they first thing I

taught wasn’t even my lesson plan. A good intern needs to wait until they know they are ready because if they

aren’t their students, especially middle school, will eat you alive.

Another time I had to practice patience was with my classroom management. I thought walking in that I

would be respected and listened to, but that unfortunately was not the case with the students. The first couple

of weeks I could tell the students didn’t respect me, but I used patience. I waited until I taught to show them

that I was not a joke and that they needed to take me seriously because what I was saying was on the

homework and the test.

Overall I believe that the best advice I could give to a future teacher intern is to use patience in

classroom management, preparation, and teaching.