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Reflection

I feel very prepared to become a teacher compared to what I see going into the schools today. I don’t feel like America puts any priority on making sure its teachers are trained. All of the schooling and requirements they make seem superfluous to me. I read about schools in Korea and Switzerland where the teachers have two years of graduate level study and a paid living expense while they prepare and then I look at what we are doing as a country. I am as prepared as I am going to be when it comes to my expectations in what the country is doing to ensure that I am a prepared teacher. Even more than what I am learning at college, I spent two years under the teacher in charge of the high school science department at my school. I was able to do everything she did by my second year. I got to see her 20+ years of experience and she was able to mentor me. I would even be pulled out of my high school classes to sub for her students. I was a senior in high school I had already gone through the lower classes, I could lecture on Physical Science, Biology, and Chemistry. I wrote, compiled, helped administered, collected, graded and entered grades into the grade book and the school grading software for 9th through 12th grade science.
The students respected me and knew that I had been given permission to lecture them while the substitute sat in the back of the room to observe. I could give a quiz at the end of class to see that they had absorbed the material. It would be graded and organized by class before the teacher would even be back to school (she had MS so she missed school unexpectedly so there was no “sub folder”).
I wrote lesson plans with her for Chemistry before I even knew that I would have classes in college telling me how to do something I was already familiar doing. I was comfortable with speaking to the kids, helping them after school, and creating problems for them to practice. After I graduated high school, the...