Thomas Histon: I’m Pretty Sucky at Teaching for a Teacher

Towards the end of high school, I made the decision to go into teaching. I loved a lot of subjects in high school, particularly English, Spanish, Theater, and Social Studies. I was blessed to have a lot of amazing teachers who helped me and guided me throughout my time in high school, and you could say I was inspired by them. When I got to college, I was so happy to discover that teaching was something I really enjoyed. I stuck with it and have decided that regardless of the subject, teaching is what I can see myself spending the rest of my life doing. During my time at Greenville Literacy Association, I discovered an important hang-up: I suck at it.

When I arrived at Greenville Literacy Association, I was given no formal training, no materials, and no guidelines on what to teach. I knew I was teaching a GED-prep course (which was also an issue because I have never taken the GED), and I knew I would be working with a mostly-adult classroom (I had never taught adults before). The GED-prep book I bought was very minimal in details and did not explain EXACTLY what would be on the test. So, structuring my course to the test was not an option. Which, in hindsight, sounds great in theory. Not bound by any particular standards, I could have structured my history class any way I wanted (within reason); no strict state standards or EOCs, I could give them whatever material I wanted, whatever activities I wanted, anything!

However, due to my lack of experience, I found myself failing to get any meaningful information off to the students, failing to connect at ALL with the students, failing to plan any lesson that was remotely innovative, interesting, original, fun, or even interesting, and struggling with retention rates, as my class started off with about thirty students and ended with about three by the end of the summer. In one instance, I came up with what I thought was a super fun game that they could play to teach my class about the Civil War. They HATED it. At one point, a student just walked out and left. Several of them spent most of the class face-down on the desk, completely out. On top of that, I accidentally hit one of my students in the head with a ball!

I was heartbroken. I had not only scraped by pretending to be a teacher for an entire summer, but I wasn’t even good at it. I felt like a complete fraud, but most importantly, because I was not that good at it, these students may not have done well on their GEDs. I wasn’t ready to rethink my entire degree (I’m a senior, so it’s too late for that anyways), but I wasn’t exactly sleeping that well either. I struggled with this feeling for a while. It wasn’t until I had lunch with one of my former teachers, and I explained these feelings to her that she told me she has been teaching for ten years and she still feels that way. She said she was at about year five before she felt even a little confident that she was doing an okay job. That gave me enough encouragement to have the confidence to suck at this. Because apparently, I have at least five years of sucking to go.

For a while I did not talk about my experience at the Greenville Literacy Association. I had wanted the summer to be a time of transformation for me, but I did not believe that my time at GLA had provided that for me. I believed my experience was humble if not boring. I was just doing exactly what I’ve been doing throughout college, and I was doing exactly what I planned to do: teach. And I wasn’t even good at it. Clearly, I hadn’t changed one bit over the summer.

Or so I thought.

I was looking at my previous reflection papers trying to find some inspiration for writing this reflection. It was boring, I was just talking about how I’ve changed up my teaching style to fit the needs of my students. My students fell asleep because I was lecturing for too long? Fine, I’ll give them some independent work so that they can be more engaged. I found that one of my students struggled with reading the articles I assigned them? Okay, I rewrote them in simpler language so she could understand the material better. This isn’t exciting, these are just things any teacher worth their salt would do.

But that’s just it. I was changing. I’m not a teacher. Not yet anyways. I am training to be a teacher. And if what I was doing at this volunteer position was any indication, I was getting better at it. I saw the needs of my students, and adapted to meet them where they were at in order to give them a better experience, and allow them to learn the material more efficiently. I was changing; I was getting better at my job! While my success was limited given that I barely had two months to teach this group what they needed to know, I was able to hone some of my skills and do exactly what I plan to do: teach.

Thomas Histon is a senior history secondary education major from Greenville, S.C. He spent his summer worked as a tutor at the Greenville Literacy Association, where he taught GED-prep Social Studies, Reading and Language Arts, and English as a Second Language.