Experience in the classroom was by far the most impactful experience of my teacher preparation program. This is where our preparation, our hypotheses, came into contact with the real world, with all its idiosyncrasies and nuances. With that being said, if it was not without a strong philosophical foundation, or if it was not without struggling with the large philosophical questions regarding education during our course work, the internship would not have been as impactful. From a more scientific perspective, I got to observe a real world school, talk to practicing teachers, and students who operate within these schools. These observations revealed a lot about teachers and students own thoughts about what there were supposed to be doing and their reasoning behind those actions/thoughts. I got to learn a lot about the teacher identities and student identities as I interacted with the people around me. Especially since I knew I was not directly entering the secondary education teaching profession, I looked at the internship as an opportunity to observe how a school operates – at least the one I interned at.

Moments that I can remember as especially revealing were ones in which my philosophy of teaching (which informs my practice) came into conflict with others expectations, both teacher and students alike. Eventually, I came to the conclusion or conviction that I was not going to attempt to overall another teachers classroom with my practice, at the end of the day, this was not my classroom, and I did not hold much weight in the science department meetings, or at least I did not want too. I did not want to alter how science was being taught in that high school. I did in many ways, it was evident in my lesson planning, when I did have the opportunity to plan lessons which looked more or less like something of my own creation. My focus turned from teaching science in the best way possible to teaching science in the most fun way I could imagine. This mostly included labs (chemistry labs) or demonstrations in which students got to participate with hands on activities. By far the most fun lessons – which I can only assume from the reactions of the majority of my students – where those including fire. Burning steel wool was especially captivating.

An existentialist in crisis,

JLS