Walking into a classroom in the morning is like taking a path down memory lane for most educators: the smells, the sights, and the feelings are the same as they were when they once walked to take a seat as a student not so long ago (or perhaps long ago, for the late bloomers). There is something so profoundly unique about being in this position of power—a place that gives you the strength to elucidate and enlighten.
Serving as an intern allows for the rare opportunity to experience this euphoria every day, always in a new way. At first, every classroom, student, and teacher is fresh to your experience, and just as a new student walks through the halls questioning his or her position in a foreign place, interns are discovering the fear of the totally unknown—or, what was once known, but has since been forgotten.
Students can sense that you’re young and not distant from the educational process, but there’s something about this knowledge that they flaunt—they want you to know that they are aware of their relationship to you as “little brothers and sisters.” Indeed, my sister next year will be entering high school, not far off in age from the students that I teach on a daily basis. The advantage here, of course, is that our youth and relative inexperience give us the ability to understand and connect with students that gravely need that pipeline to a trustworthy adult figure. Some students don’t have the support beams necessary to handle crisis situations, and in many cases, in your very first year in education, you will be all of the things that a student needs by default. In the words of the teacher and writer Frank McCourt in his epic book Teacher Man, “In the high school classroom you are a drill sergeant, a rabbi, a shoulder to cry on, a disciplinarian, a singer, a low-level scholar, a clerk, a referee, a clown, a counselor, a dress-code enforcer, a conductor, an apologist, a philosopher, a collaborator, a tap dancer, a politician, a therapist, a fool, a traffic cop, a priest, a mother-father-brother-sister-uncle-aunt, a bookkeeper, a critic, a psychologist, the last straw.” You will be a jack of all trades, and master of all of them—not because you want to be, but because you need to be.
Some folks would question this lifestyle; after all, a job that pays for one service but asks for many is asking for the world, right? I wouldn’t hope for it to be any other way. Let them ask for the world. I’ll give them the universe.
--Josh Hagewood
Josh graduated from Rutgers University in 2009 with undergraduate degrees in History and Geography. Subscribe to our feed for more posts from Josh.
