poeticwasteland:

I’m currently student teaching 7th grade Language Arts. Back while I was still observing, my cooperating teacher put a sentence on the board trying to instruct the students about the placement of commas when writing a series. Fine, great, wonderful. But she neglected to add in the oxford comma, and it bothered me so much that I was compelled to get up and fix it. An action to which she responded, “Only real English teachers do that.” 

Oh I’m sorry? Are you not a real English teacher?

Now that I think on it, maybe she’s not. She nitpicked the students into calling me by my full last name, despite the fact that both they, and I, were happy with “Ms. K”, yet she doesn’t insist upon them adding commas where they belong?

I looked forward to student teaching since I began work on my masters, and this woman is making my life hell. 

Ignorance in students is one thing, — it’s my job to alter that — but ignorance in fellow teachers is a whole different ball game. One, I really have no desire in which to play. 

7 weeks to go. 

I wonder if when she said “Only real English teachers do that,” she might have been referring to the action of correcting another English teacher.

Correcting your mentor teacher in front of the students is a poor choice in action, in my opinion. First of all, it undermines her authority as a knowledgeable figure in the classroom.  Secondly, you don’t necessarily know what she was going to be doing.  Maybe she wasn’t going to introduce that concept yet, but was going to do so later.  Maybe she was going to ask the students if anything was wrong with the sentence, or if there’s anything they might have done differently with the sentence.  Maybe she was going to catch it and correct herself later, which I’ve seen teachers do in the classroom before — because teachers are human and make mistakes or forget things, and students benefit (in my opinion) by seeing that to some degree.

Maybe she doesn’t use the Oxford comma - not everyone does. 

But putting this under the “ignorance” label is possibly a poor choice, whatever your feelings may be on the other things she does in the classroom.

No teacher is a perfect teacher.  Sometimes teachers make poor decisions in the classroom.  But other times, what you consider a poor decision is actually a difference in style, or a decision that will have clear reasoning later on.  As a student teacher, you’re a sort of guest in the classroom.  If your mentor teacher is doing something that doesn’t sit right with you, I would make a mental note of it and address it with them later, when they’re not in the midst of a lesson.  If it still isn’t resolved, you could talk to your faculty or placement adviser to see if this is something to take further action on, or something to file away as “things I will never do in my classroom.”

In the future, maybe asking your mentor teacher to explain or walk through a lesson before they teach the lesson will help you better understand their choices.  It will also show an active interest in your mentor teacher’s technique, which may help build mutual respect — though there’s no guarantee that the teacher may say it isn’t something they have time for.

In the end, sometimes your mentor teacher is going to do something you don’t agree with.  Use your best judgement in deciding whether it’s something that should be addressed or not — but don’t address it in front of their students.

This is just my opinion, built on my own experience student-teaching.