Self-fulfilling Prophecy: A reflection on teaching

 

I had felt fine all morning but as the time drew closer for the students to arrive my stomach began hurting. The more my stomach hurt the more anxious I felt. Then the more anxious I felt the more my stomach hurt. It was a terrible cycle which resulted in me being completely embarrassed of my visible anxiety. 

I know that I was not able to say everything during my presentation that I had planned on saying and I wasn’t able to ask all of the questions I wanted to either because I simply forgot what I was doing since I was focused on myself. I knew going in there that I was going to do that and I had tried to prepare myself mentally to think about the students and the lecture and not about myself. But, I lost the battle inside my brain when it finally happened. I was a victim of the self-fulfilling prophecy where the outcome happens as you perceived it was going to happen prior to it happening. “If men define situations are real, they are real in their consequences” -W.I. Thomas (R.K. Merton 1948) However, as time went on the whole process became a lot easier. The students were very supportive on top of being generally awesome kids. 

I realized that I had been very pessimistic about the students desire to learn and their desire to be there. When I was in high school I was very shy and I put on apathetic airs to cover the fact that I was just completely uncomfortable due to a debilitating case of social anxiety. I always acted uninterested, especially if the material was difficult to understand. I would give up instead of trying. So, I thought the students from Hopewell were going to be the exact same way. It was completely the opposite. Some of the students did admit that they were there because it allowed them to skip their other classes but they were all very enthusiastic anyway. They did not come in with a lot of knowledge on the subject, or rather they didn’t think they had a lot of knowledge on the subject. By the end of the day they were correctly answering questions about the complexities of the carbon cycle. It seemed to me that once they were given the pieces of the puzzle they were pretty much able understand everything that was happening. I also didn’t think that they would want to go outside and mess with the water since it was freezing that day but they were really good sports about it. We had some trouble doing the dissolved oxygen kit. I wish I had gone back over the directions that morning so that I could walk them through each step without confusion of my own. I also dropped one of the water samples on the ground ruining the test and looking unprofessional doing so. 

I was very grateful to the students for paying attention to me, laughing at me, and working diligently without complaints. It felt good. It gave me hope that when I do become a teacher, my students will listen to me. As of right now the middle schoolers I work with do not treat me like an authority figure but rather as one of their own who knows all of the answers. I wish I had gotten as much attention from eighth grade boys and invitations to the girls’ birthday parties when I was 12 as I do now that I’m twice their age. 

I think that the excel presentation will go a lot smoother and easier because I have already had contact with the students and have seen that they will work and listen if told to do so. 

I think that it is hard to understand where each student sits in their personal understanding of the subject when you are the teacher. When I would ask a question someone would answer correctly so I would assume that everyone understood. Then when I went to work on the the worksheet with one of the tables I realized that not every single student understood just because that one who answered correctly did. However, as a student I can see differing levels of understanding clearly in my classes. I know that some students get it while others don’t. I never realized that teachers don’t see that as clearly. I feel like I should stop answering questions in my classes and let the students who do not understand get caught up, or I should be more audible when I personally do not understand something even though the other students do. I learned in my teacher preparation class that differentiation can help teachers better guage where each student is at. Differentiation is tailoring your lesson plans and instruction in order to meet varied needs in the classroom since students learn at different speeds and by different stimuli (C.A. Tomlinson 2000). This is a critical tool to use in developing lesson plans and we utilized it even if we didn’t realize it. We did lecture-based learning, worksheets that involved reading, writing, and problem-based learning, as well as a hands-on approach by physically bringing the students to the mesocosms and testing the water samples. 

I hope that the students retained the information that they were given on this field trip (even though it was so much information in such a small amount of time) and had fun as well. Even if they did not understand everything, hopefully the teachers can use the field trip as a reference aid when going back over all of the processes of photosynthesis and respiration. 

 

 

Merton, Robert K. “The self-fulfilling prophecy.” The Antioch Review 8.2 (1948): 193-210.

Tomlinson, Carol Ann. “Reconcilable differences: Standards-based teaching and differentiation.” Educational Leadership 58.1 (2000): 6-13.