Well, as one of our famed professors said, flexibility is a key trait we all need to acquire as future teachers. I realize this more and more every day. Every day it seems like a new situation is presented: I might have to cover a teacher's classroom so they can take care of their child who just got sick, I might have to do the video for my TPA today instead of next week like I planned because CST testing starts next week, I might have to teach in a fourth class so that I can complete all the requirements for my BCLAD, I might have to make my lesson plans extra detailed because my CT has asked me to provide lessons to her so she can teacher the 3rd 11th grade class (I'm teaching the first 2) the same material that I am covering, and so on.
All these, of course, are situations I have experienced this semester and I guess the more they happened the less I should be surprised when they come up. Although they are annoying and taxing circumstances, I understand more and more how important it is for me to rise to each challenge. We are teachers after all and our primary focus is our students and providing them with whatever they need. Although most of the circumstances I described above apply to me and not really my students, I know that once I get a full time job more and more these situations will revolve around my students. I will have to adapt to their needs because I am their teacher and it is my job to provide and take care of them while they are in my classroom.
One specific example related to a student that comes to mind is when I was returning to my car in the school parking lot at 11 p.m. I was doing this because I had carpooled with a friend to a class I had that night. When I got to the parking lot I noticed there was a student there. Curious, I went over to him and asked him what he was doing there. After all, there was literally no one else around. He told me that his brother had forgotten to pick him up and he had no cell phone or money to call anyone from a payphone. Also, he lived in a city 15 miles away up a 2 lane road in the mountains. Flabbergasted, I offered him the use of my cell phone. Fortunately he was able to call his grandparents who lived close by so that he could spend the night with him.
This whole situation, made it so that I didn't make it home until closer to midnight. Although it added stress to my life I'm very thankful that this situation presented itself for a couple reasons. The first and most important is that student was able to get home and not have to spend the night out in the cold all by himself. The second is it made me realize as a teacher I need to be considerate and flexible to students special circumstances. If that student had been in my classroom the next day (and I had not been there to help him get home) I probably would have thought him lazy as I saw him fall asleep at his desk. I may have even gotten on this student's case for not doing his homework. Of course, I would have done this all without knowing what he had potentially just been through. To make a long story short, this would have been unkind and unfair to this student. As teachers we need to realize there may be a lot more going on underneath a student's behavior instead of them just being lazy, rebellious, or defiant.
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