Sydney Cortez

Virginia Teacher for Tomorrow

31 May 2022

How the internship changed me.

Mistakes and Unrealistic Expectations

Imagine the feeling you get before your boss walks in for your evaluation. Now try to

imagine that same feeling when trying to work through your very first lesson plan teaching

3rd-grade students how to make a fruit snack bar graph…all while forgetting how to do them

yourself. Don’t get me wrong being a part of an internship is fun, however, there come many

challenges when having a preconceived idea of what it should look like. Throughout my two and

a half months of interning as a Virginia Teachers for Tomorrow student, I learned many things

but most importantly that mistakes are essential, and setting too high of standards will fail.

You would think teaching a topic as simple as bar graphs would be easy, right? Wrong, in

my first lesson plan I made many small mistakes. In my attempt to teach these students how to

create a bar graph, I forgot to label the x-axis, color coordinate the bars, sort the fruit snacks by

colors and shape, etc. Where most people think these were not such big mistakes, I on the other

hand was freaking out about them. From the perspective of a 3rd grader, I am seen as an adult

that has gone through college and knows everything, not the case. I set unrealistic and high

expectations for myself while forgetting that I would have to reteach myself how to think like a

3rd grader. From the start of my internship, I recalled my experience with student teachers of

their age and forced myself to believe that I had to be perfect just as I remember my student

teachers being. While going through this lesson plan, I learned quickly that no matter how my
students viewed me, mistakes were necessary and I was the only one who was trying to achieve

such difficult expectations. On the inside, I would have a self-panic moment of just

second-guessing myself and how I was explaining things to the students. I would especially

stutter a lot after making a mistake and afterward be harsh on myself. Seeing how my students

didn’t react to my mistakes, I realized that I needed to relax and understand that I was working

with 3rd graders and not college professors.

From this experience, I recognized that teachers are not perfect in the way that

individuals view them, especially how I shouldn’t have made unrealistic standards for myself

and that mistakes are good to make. That being said, putting myself in a teacher's shoes made me

understand how high expectations can lead to burnout in teachers and how making mistakes in

front of your students is necessary to their learning. Making mistakes in front of students allows

them to see that it’s okay to not be perfect and it helps them to boost their confidence when

making mistakes. I was able to learn the importance of mistakes during my internship journey.

Mistakes allowed me to learn more and better understand a topic. Trying to be perfect was

physically and mentally draining, I put so much effort into my lessons along with pressing

myself to teach perfectly, that I forgot I needed to be able to take a breather and just go with the

flow of things. In the broad spectrum of what I learned, I can take what I learned and apply it to

everyday life. For example, not beating myself up after every mistake and just because my

expectations are not set above my head doesn’t mean that I expect the bare minimum from

myself.