final reflection
WHO I WAS Student teaching was probably the most stressful event of my life. Not moving from Rhode Island, a state with a population of 1 million-plus, to South Dakota, where cows outnumber people . Not navigating my way through college courses AGAIN, after a five-year gap of unfulfilled, stale dreams at the family business. Teaching. This past spring, when I entered the classroom in the Providence school where I would be teaching a senior section of British literature, I did not know what I was getting into. Sure, I knew the bones of teaching -- the stuff gleaned from classes over the past two years in RIC’s MAT program. I had read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein before, and I had almost-kind of finished 1984 when I was a senior in high school. I knew that social justice would have to be “factored in” when it came to designing my lessons, units, questions… I had the formula, right? But what I didn’t know, is how physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted I wa